The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can't stop using

I would bias less toward, trying in one go to tell the model, 'Hey, here's exactly what I want you to do.' Instead what I would do is I would chop things up into bits.

Cursor hires engineers through a two-day onsite work project where candidates build mock features in their actual codebase.

We have people onsite for two days, and do a project with us, a work test project. And that has worked really well, that increasingly you're finding that.

I think taste will be increasingly more valuable. And I think often when people think about tastes in the realm of software, they think about visuals, or taste over smooth animations, and coloring things, UI, UX, et cetera on the visual design of things.

I think that more and more being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer, and really, it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work.

We try to be very pragmatic about the place that we're going to do this work, and we don't want to reinvent the wheel. And so starting from the very best pre-trained models that exist out there, often open source ones.

I think the ceiling is so high that no matter what entrenchment you build, you can be leapfrogged. And I think that this resembles markets that are maybe a little bit different from normal software markets.

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built by Anysphere that helps software engineers write code more efficiently.

We definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development. And at this point, every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way.