Lenny's Podcast · May 1The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell
Cursor first hand-rolled its editor, then rebased on VS Code after user feedback, the way many browsers build on Chromium.
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App · Developer tools
Visual Studio Code
A widely used open source code editor from Microsoft.
What was said about Visual Studio Code
Product strategy and PMF2
- Ship an early version fast and let user feedback shape the foundation▶ 26:06They expected to serve a couple hundred people for a long time, but saw an immediate rush of interest at launch.Lenny's Podcast · The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell
- Build your own surface when host APIs cap the user experience▶ 15:21Autocomplete acceptance rate tripled after porting to Windsurf with the same ML models.Lenny's Podcast · Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1m developers in 4 months: Inside Windsurf
Building AI products1
Lenny's Podcast · May 1Lenny's Podcast · Apr 20Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1m developers in 4 months: Inside Windsurf
Its APIs capped what AI features Windsurf could show, forcing the team to generate images next to the cursor for inline refactors. That limit led them to fork it into their own IDE.
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Lenny's Podcast · Sep 4The role of AI in new product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub)
Had no extensibility for multi-line autocomplete, so the VS Code and GitHub teams co-designed it over about a year and a half, testing keystrokes and presentation.
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