Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students

Truell began programming to make a mobile game with his brother, then built apps and experimented with robotics. As a teenager, he and a friend implemented a small neural network for microcontrollers and explored reinforcement learning with robots, including an arm that learned to swing a ping-pong paddle.

In 2022, Truell and his co-founders explored AI applications for knowledge work, starting with a copilot for mechanical engineers. The CAD project struggled because the team lacked domain experience and the technology was not ready. They shifted toward coding because they were more excited about its future, and believed AI could change how software gets built.

The team spent about three months building and releasing an early editor, initially assembling it from open-source components rather than starting with VS Code. They learned that a complete editor would take far longer than expected, so they moved to building on VS Code and focused on AI features. Early users and prototypes offered competing directions, and the team had to decide where to focus.

Truell attributed Cursor’s growth to making the product more useful: codebase awareness, faster and more accurate next-action predictions, and AI that could handle sequences of changes. He said improvements showed up quickly in usage and spread through word of mouth. The company had fewer than ten employees at the end of 2023.

Truell expects AI to transform software development over decades, with a long period in which engineers work alongside AI and still read, review, and edit code. He sees programming and computer science as valuable general education. His advice to aspiring founders is to work on problems they care about with people they respect and enjoy working with.