Cursor.so: The AI-first Code Editor — with Aman Sanger of Anysphere
Thanks to the almost 30k people who tuned in to the last episode!
Your podcast cohosts have been busy shipping:
* Alessio open sourced smol-podcaster, which makes the show notes here!
* swyx launched GodMode. Maybe someday the Cursor of browsers?
* We’re also helping organize a Llama Finetuning Hackameetup this Saturday in anticipation of the CodeLlama release.
Lastly, more speakers were announced at AI Engineer Summit! 👀
~46% of code typed through VS Code is written by Copilot. How do we get closer to 90+%? Aman Sanger says we need a brand new AI-powered IDE to get there; and we’re excited to be the first podcast ever to tell the Cursor story.
If you haven’t heard of Cursor, you may have been living under a rock. Here are just some of the rave reviews going around in the past week alone:
* “Cursor is the best product I've used in a while” - Alex MacCaw
* “Someone finally put GPT into a code editor in a seamless way. It's so elegant and easy. No more copying and pasting.” - Andrew McCalip
* “Coding with AI is getting insane.” - Mckay Wrigley
* “This is mind blowing 🤯” - Linus Ekenstam
* “Cursor + gpt4-32k = illegal levels of productivity” - Sully Omarr
* “EL MEJOR EDITOR DE CÓDIGO con IA” - Carlos Santana
A decade ago, “platform risk” meant building apps on social media platforms was risky as you could get cut off from the social network.
Today, the AI version of “platform risk” is building AI products within an existing product (like an AI extension for VS Code, or a Figma plugin). Since Copilot, a generation of VSCode plugins have launched (including Cody, Cosine, and previous guests Codeium and Codium), only to be challenged by Copilot X itself.
A core AI Engineering thesis is that new capabilities in AI demands new innovation in AI UX (and that AI UX can actually be a viable moat). Take VS Code for example; when Github was first working on Copilot, there was actually no way to support the “ghost autocomplete” feature we all use today. They eventually convinced the team to build it, and Copilot’s success speaks for itself.
If you’re a startup building on top of VSC today, you do not have the same access and influence on the roadmap. Your UX is limited to what they allow you to do, and often that caps your ability to successfully compete against them.
Since Cursor owns the whole IDE, they can do things you can’t (yet) do in VSCode:
Cursor’s Gameplan
Cursor is competing head to head against VS Code by forking Microsoft’s IDE and building their own AI-powered version. A few of Cursor’s unique features:
* Native chat: Chat is a core piece of Cursor. Users can choose between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to ask questions and receive answers based on their code.
* “Mentioning” files: you can easily add files into your request context by using “@”; this works both for code as well as documentation. If you want
