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Y Combinator @ycombinator on x 1.5M followers
Created: 2025-06-11 14:05:39 UTC
Michael Truell (@mntruell), co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind @Cursor_ai, joined @garrytan to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting everything on a world beyond code.
He walks through the early insights that led him and his co-founders to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written.
From the hard years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it really takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first XX hires, why taste still matters, and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
01:00 - A new way to build software 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First XX hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead
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