Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447

The idea of jumping to next to action is super compelling.

I'm an 81-year-old programmer and I really enjoyed seeing these young whippersnappers. If I had AGI look at the code that I wrote in the early 60s they would say it was hallucinating.

Good to see Lex get back to technical discussions. Who was here when Lex was primarily an AI/technology podcast? 🙋‍♂️

Thank you for this episode. I recognize these more technical shows probably don’t get the same numbers as your episodes with big name guests that are recognized outside of the tech industry. I pray you keeping on creating them though. They are just the right level for someone like me who is tech oriented, but not as knowledgeable as a professional. So interesting!

Love the respect they all have for each other as each person is speaking. Brilliant humans.

Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep447-sa See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. 0:00 - Introduction 0:59 - Code editor basics 3:09 - GitHub Copilot 10:27 - Cursor 16:54 - Cursor Tab 23:08 - Code diff 31:20 - ML details 36:54 - GPT vs Claude 43:28 - Prompt engineering 50:54 - AI agents 1:04:51 - Running code in background 1:09:31 - Debugging 1:14:58 - Dangerous code 1:26:09 - Branching file systems 1:29:20 - Scaling challenges 1:43:32 - Context 1:48:39 - OpenAI o1 2:00:01 - Synthetic data 2:03:48 - RLHF vs RLAIF 2:05:34 - Fields Medal for AI 2:08:17 - Scaling laws 2:17:06 - The future of programming *Transcript:* https://lexfridman.com/cursor-team-transcript *CONTACT LEX:* *Feedback* - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey *AMA* - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama *Hiring* - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring *Other* - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact *EPISODE LINKS:* Cursor Website: https://cursor.com Cursor on X: https://x.com/cursor_ai Anysphere Website: https://anysphere.inc/ Aman's X: https://x.com/amanrsanger Aman's Website: https://amansanger.com/ Arvid's X: https://x.com/ArVID220u Arvid's Website: https://arvid.xyz/ Michael's Website: https://mntruell.com/ Michael's LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3zIDkPN Sualeh's X: https://x.com/sualehasif996 Sualeh's Website: https://sualehasif.me/ *SPONSORS:* To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: *Encord:* AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/encord-ep447-sa *MasterClass:* Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/masterclass-ep447-sa *Shopify:* Sell stuff online. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep447-sa *NetSuite:* Business management software. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/netsuite-ep447-sa *AG1:* All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep447-sa

This interview shouldn't exist. How tf can these so young people be so capable and cutting edge.. That's amazing and concerning at the same time.

Cursor is the first tool I've used in a long time that's actually lived up to the hype. Being able to link multiple files as context is probably the biggest game changer, it saves so much time trying to find where the disconnect is between several files. I've got a lot of respect for these gents and what they're building. 💪

1:18:18 really want to highlight this beautiful engineering-team moment. Arvid is sort of defending his hypothesis, and a new question/argument comes along, everyone is onboard, they start facing each other, they propose ideas and explanations. No one is out to put the other down or win an argument, they just want to clarify their different understandings. Feels like we get a small glimpse of how amazing their day-to-day discussions happen and I can see why they have reached so much progress! Really impressed with how they work as a team, and if you want to drag in AI into that topic, that will be hard to replace in practice. The amount of context they can convey verbally to each other and how much each individual processes the others arguments, and they arrive to a consensus, just beautiful.

"Using cursor to write cursor" has to be the most underrated line of the podcast. Crazyy times ahead