Sualeh Asif

Pure Vim.

Yeah, you can sort of iterate and fix it. I mean, the other underrated part of Copilot for me sort of was just the first real AI product. So the first language model consumer product.

It's bigger and better, but predictably better. That's another topic of conversation.

There's one that I distinctly remember. So my roommate is an IML Gold winner, and there's a competition in the U.S. called the Putnam, which is sort of the IML for college people, and it's this math competition. He's exceptionally good. So Sheng Tong and Aman, I remember, it's sort of June of 2022.

had this bet on whether 2024, June or July, you were going to win a gold medal in the IMO with models.

Yeah, I was International Math Olympiad. And so Arvid and I are both, you know, also competed in it. So it was sort of personal. And I remember thinking, Matt, this is not going to happen. This was like, even though I sort of believed in progress, I thought... you know, I'm a girl just like a modest, just delusional.

That was the, that was the, and to be honest, I mean, I, I was to be clear, very wrong, but that was maybe the most prescient bet in the group.

I don't know if I think of it in terms of features as I think of it in terms of capabilities for programmers. It's that as the new one model came out, and I'm sure there are going to be more models of different types, like longer context and maybe faster. There's all these... crazy ideas that you can try. And hopefully 10% of the crazy ideas will make it into something kind of cool and useful.

And we want people to have that sooner. To rephrase, it's like an underrated fact is we're making it for ourself. When we started Cursor, you really felt this frustration that, you know, models, you could see models getting better. But the COBOL experience had not changed. It was like, man, these guys, the ceiling is getting higher. Why are they not making new things?

They should be making new things. Where's all the alpha features? There were no alpha features. It was like... I'm sure it was selling well. I'm sure it was a great business, but it didn't feel, I'm one of these people that really want to try and use new things. And it was just, there's no new thing for like a very long while.

Yeah, it's like the person making the UI and the person training the model sit 18 feet away.

Yeah, often even the same person. You can create things that are sort of not possible if you're not talking, you're not experimenting.

One of the things we really wanted was we wanted the model to be able to edit code for us. That was kind of a wish, and we had multiple attempts at it before we had a good model that could edit code for you. Then after we had a good model, I think there'd been a lot of effort to make the inference fast for having a good experience.

And we've been starting to incorporate, I mean, Michael sort of mentioned this, like, ability to jump to different places. And that jump to different places, I think, came from a feeling of, you know, once you accept an edit, it's like, man, it should be just really obvious where to go next.

It's like, I made this change, the model should just know that, like, the next place to go to is, like, 18 lines down. Like, if you're a WIM user, you could press 1, 8, JJ, or whatever.

but like why why even why am i doing this like the model the model should just know it and then so so the idea was you just press tab it would go 18 lines down and then make it show you show you the next edit and you would press tab so it's just you as long as you could keep pressing tab and so the internal competition was how many tabs can we make someone press it once you have like the idea uh more more uh sort of

abstractly, the thing to think about is how are the edits zero entropy? So once you've expressed your intent and the edit is... There's no new bits of information to finish your thought, but you still have to type some characters to make the computer understand what you're actually thinking. Then maybe the model should just read your mind and all the zero entropy bits should just be tabbed away.

Yeah, that was that was sort of the abstract.

Yeah. And then like launch. Hopefully jump to different files also. So if you make an edit in one file and... Maybe you have to go to another file to finish your thought. It should go to the second file also.

Oh, yeah. Oh, we did that. We did that.