Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ll be guest hosting the next few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave, and I’m very excited for what we have planned.
If you’ve followed my work at all, particularly when I was a reporter at The Verge, you’ll know that I’m a total productivity nerd. At their best, productivity apps are the way we turn technological advancement into human progress. And also: they’re fun! I like trying new software, and every new tool brings the hope that this will be the one that completes the setup of my dreams.
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Over the years, I’ve used a lot of these programs, but I rarely get a chance to talk to the people who make them. So, for my Decoder episodes, I really wanted to talk to the people behind some of the biggest and most interesting companies in productivity about what they’re building and how they can help us get things done.
That brings me to my guest today: Michael Truell, the CEO of Anysphere. You may not have heard of Anysphere, but you’ve likely heard the name of its flagship product: Cursor. Cursor is an automated programming platform that integrates with generative AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others to help you write code.
Cursor is built into a standard version of what programmers call an integrated development environment, or IDE, with technology like Cursor Tab, which autocompletes lines of code as you write. Cursor has quickly become one of the most popular and fastest-growing AI products in the world, and Anysphere, the company Michael cofounded just three years ago after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now shaping up to be one of the biggest startup success stories of the post-ChatGPT era.
So I sat down with Michael to talk about Cursor, how it works, and why coding with AI has seen such incredible adoption. As you’ll hear Michael explain, this entire field has evolved very quickly over the past few years — and here in San Francisco, tech executives and employees regularly tell me about how much their employees love using Cursor.
AI critics are worried that this technology could automate jobs, and rightly so — but you’ll hear Michael say that job losses won’t come from simple advances in tools like the one he’s making. And while a lot of people in the Bay Area believe superintelligent AI is going to remake the world overnight, making products like Cursor pointless, Michael actually believes change is going to come much more slowly.
I also wanted to ask Michael about the phenomenon of vibe coding, which lets amateurs use tools like Cursor to experiment in building software of their own. That’s not Cursor’s primary audience, Michael tells me. But it is part of this broader shift in programming, and he’s convinced that we’re only just scratching the surface of how much AI can really do here.
Okay: Anysphere CEO Michael Truell. Here we go.
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