YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryo Lu

lines on the record: 44
first: 2025-12-16
most recent: 2025-12-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There is these timeless things that don't change much It kind of all comes back to. People were trying to come up with some really familiar ideas and then bring them to like a new medium. We're doing the same thing again. Back in 1984 and now, like people are just, I don't know, using paint to draw some pictures. There's like a text editor you can type some stuff. There's like a know different concepts that we put in little pictures the icons the desktop like none of that really changed”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a lot of the interfaces that I created, I started from It's kind of inspired from system 7. There is accuracy, but also like I added some future stuff in it And then I actually made more themes. I added a macOS X theme, like the first Aqua theme. I added like Windows 95 and XP. And then if you swap between them and you play with OS, it feels really authentic to each, but then it's actually the same thing. So that's kind of like the message I want to kind of tell people. Almost doing the same thing over and over again from the very beginning, but maybe given the technical constraints of each era. That's how it ended there and how it ended, how it came to be. But we kind of carried a lot of these concepts and patterns over to even now. And then we are actually still living in it. And I don't think things will change that much, meaning.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started the thing from, so I was leaving Notion and I make noises when I'm in meetings. So like, oh no, we're. All the same thing, stuff like that. I wanted to make them a little gift. So I built a soundboard app with cursor. It was just one app. Like it looked really bad. Like Tailwind default styles. And then I just said, what if we made it more like retro mac OS-E? And then it put it in almost like a more retro mac OS type window. Like put it in the box And then I'm like, add a menu bar. And then it added on top. I'm like, now I have a menu bar and a window. Why not just Make more apps and more windows. And then that's how it kind of started. And then I just couldn't stop for like, I don't know, four or three months.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that humans made, the nature side of things are really cool too. Like learning about natural systems, I have a biomajor. So there's a lot of similarities in how many layers of things you can build, how they interact with each other. Looking at the past helps a lot. Say, like my Rio OS project kind of started from. Like last year, I was just I bought a bunch of Oat Macs and iPods and I was just playing with them. And I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really have a routine or a kind of sporadic. I don't sit in figma all day and making mocks. I It's like doing everything at once type of vibe. So I might be thinking about a longer problem. I would maybe just write. I like writing and Of thinking in bullets Out of the office on a walk and then take my phone with like an Ocean page and I would just start writing. I'll make sketches. Maybe play individual space. I'll maybe like, you know, build a prototype and code. Lot of my inspirations come from Like, not forcing it and kind of leaving some blank space. To let things simmer. Lot of it comes from Just looking at stuff or Looking at everything, not just software. So, like, you can look at print design, graphic design, motion, films, music, art.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the designers, what they're really doing is. Are thinking of What is the minimal set of abstractions the system to kind of To all of these permutations.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example is most of the CLI coding agents today is like they kind of force you to use this tiny little window with this tiny prompt, like that's almost like all the interactions you can do. And then you're kind of delegating everything to the agent. You don't really know how things work versus for cursors. If you prefer something minimal, I think it's fine. You can do that. But you can start digging into more things. You can customize the agent. You can make your own custom mode with different model preferences and which tools I want, which prompts I want. You can pick like maybe like instead of viewing just code I want like a preview, I want like a doc thing. I want a browser thing. I can change all the colors. Like it's all up to you. I can prefer the keyboard. I can prefer the mouse.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it's like the designer They're really thinking about What are the most important concepts? How do they relate to each other? Every layer, say like for 80% of people, the defaults, what should they be? What should be the simplest state of this app or this thing? What is the default for maybe like you can start forking it for different people? And then it's like maybe at the second layer, there's like you start exposing more like the power user features where the Different archetypes of where you can do. The default should still stay simple. And then the ideal is like a lot of the tools, they don't really tell you what's going on or how the things work.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can kind of accommodate more things. Say like there's secondary level things that maybe some people want to do. Maybe it's like more specific modes of operations where parts of the workflow. Maybe it is like For different kinds of individual preferences, but they are still like, Of layers of the core concepts were things that are not kind of linearly additive. Throw out all at you at once. And I think the interface where How software manifests themselves or how we design even, it will start becoming less about, say, the designer desires, ah, these are the buttons where they are. And then it's like a fixed thing, but rather it's like there's like shared concepts and shared mechanisms. The same thing, but I could say take different forms where you can kind of expose ways for people to customize and make them their own.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest constraint is. Kind of like Simplicity in the sense. There's a limit of how much. Concepts were things you can expose to any given individual at any given time for them to kind of figure things out. So, there is a natural constraint That side, for example, like on the cognitive side, there's maybe a constraint on space. So like cursor the window, you can stretch it like this or what if it's like this? Then you start reducing things where like you're kind of like prioritizing what to show, what is the most important. And then those things actually don't change that much or like it is really important to figure those things out And then you can kind of Build a mechanism where”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get them through that thing too here instead of like forcing people to be, ah, now you need to use this tool and then you actually don't know how it connects with your current workflow. You need to figure it out. You don't really know how it works. It feels kind of scary. Ah, what do I do? Versus like you actually ease them in through the thing they are used to. And I think those are actually the more optimal form factors for say the individual person or the use case itself because I know like I just don't want to type in a question every time or give me like this wall of text of resources. Versus, say, like, uh, The lines that you autocomplete just appears. You just press tab Like maybe I just select some element in my artboard and say, Ah, make four variants of it, and boom, it's there. But underneath is the same thing”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think. Can imagine There is only chat. I think that will also be like a really bad experience because you stare at a blank input, you need to do something. You need to initiate the thing. You need to ask the right questions, put in the right prompt. You might not know what kind of response you will get unless you play with this thing a lot. A new person, maybe like you know, they might try it the first time they get something that doesn't feel like what they wanted. And they're like, this is not for me. This is bad. But I think there's There's so much potential where, like, I think the models today, I can't already do so much stuff for a lot of people, for a lot of use cases, we need to kind of design a mechanism to kind of help Transform that input output into the form or format or views or workflows. Of the people today.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find the shape that fits them, Ben, if it will feel more comfortable. But also there's always this baseline thing, which is just, it's almost like Google, like ChatGPT is just a box. You can actually put whatever. But there will be more specific tools that fit each person or each use case better.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I see AI almost like a universe or interface. And then the bare minimum of it is really just a prompt and then you get some response, then you can kind of put this into like different forms. It could be like a little input, like a chat box. It could be like a sidebar, you know, you see the chat. It could be maybe you select something you can do stuff with it. But it could also say you completely transform this layer. It's not chat. It's not like an input. more fitted to say it's more purposeful even but underneath it is still the same thing it is still the same ai same age and same architecture same like you can flip different models and prompts and stuff but then fundamentally That is what it is. But because of that, you can actually build a lot of different layers and shapes. Then each person”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so open-ended, it's kind of hard to get started if I don't have the patience to kind of figure out how it works, I might not even get to the tests and projects. There's always that tension, but it is fixable. Can build better packaging. You can use AI. So, I think there's My personal preferences, I would try to build something that works. Better for everyone than just ah, these people are the people we care about. I don't care about everything else. And then I think they should use my thing. That's not how you do it.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like you come in, you can start from a blank page, you can type, but then what you're doing is actually blog pages databases and the workspace. Each block is almost like a JSON object. A page is just an array of JSON objects. And then we render each block in the layout and the type it is. And then you can put them in the database. Now they have more properties. They share more stuff. There's more hierarchy. And all pages can nest each other. That is notion, but then you can do whatever with it. You can have a task project database. They all work together. They can be a list. They can be a board. Do whatever you want. But then the problem is for these more universal Of apps, it's like.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When, if you look at the thing, like all these purposeful app, whatever, I could also work at Asana. Asana, the core concepts are really tests and projects. Everything around tasks and projects, everything they add needs to work with those. And that naturally limits what it can do. Like how we see notion, it is not note taking. It is disguised as note taking.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it kind of limits you from the beginning because when you start building these specific solutions, they only work for those specific people. If you want to grow the people or you want to grow the use cases, you actually need to kind of tear apart everything you have, your core concepts. A lot of people just can't do that. So, what they do is instead of doing that, they add more things, more concepts, more features. And then there will be a point where this thing no longer serves your initial group of people anymore. The simple thing is no longer simple. The purposeful thing is no longer simple. And all of these purposeful apps, they're kind of selfish. They are siloing people, siloing workflows for a file formats, creating islands.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Think it's just like different philosophies of doing things and making software. I think there's like almost like two ways you can look at the thing. There's The user centric human centered design path, which is, you know, you start from a problem. You identified a group of people who have this problem, figure out what they want, build really specific solutions for them Like there's the more system angle to think about things where you're just kind of looking at the software itself, how it is composed, and then think about. Where do I tweak a little bit to satisfy this constraint or to make this use case work? I think it's like fundamentally two different philosophies and then. Think it is much easier to do the user centric way”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can come up with a set of universal shared concepts for interacting with AI, with agents, with code, with software. You can kind of mutate each one to fit more people and to fit more use cases. And then each of them can leverage the best model to do this UI thing with the best view that fits me. I can configure it however I want. If I want to see everything, I can. If I don't want to see anything, I can too”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just like kind of chatting with the browser next to it as the agent is making edits, they can kind of preview the changes. They can maybe interact in the browser, pick this element, change like, ah, I want to swap this with something else and then boom, it happens. So, how we do it is not creating new products or splitting cursor. That is the same thing. But just like different pre-configurations and packaging of the same thing. Like, kind of like what I just said, like thinking about the concepts, like cursor itself is actually really simple. Like AI agents in general are pretty simple. What you want to do is actually If you look at, I don't know, like a chat GPT agent versus a cursor versus a replt, a v0, a notion agent even, the architecture or how they work or like they're almost the same. So,”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example is like when you open up cursor, there's like three buttons. It says open project, connect to SSH, clone repo or something. As a beginner, we're like a non-techno person. I can't understand any of this. But what if say like we just kind of give you the agent view blank? You can just start doing things. Like there's a lot of little things we can kind of fix to just make cursor feel more friendly and welcoming for these people who are kind of injured people who are maybe they know software concepts or certain layers, but they might not be able to code. I want to make sure that when they come in they can Like without feeling overwhelmed or feeling like, ah, this is like a code editor, it's an IDE, it is more like I can start doing things. And as I start doing things, I can maybe like pick the path that I Select a designer may be”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I think. Is still like our primary focus is on professional developers and teams. But because of that, people around them are already here. I think for the longest time, we've been actually intentionally making cursor pretty hard to get in. Say the non technical people. But they are here now. And they actually struggle to get in and they really want to get in.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the simplest state for all of us. Some people may be only focused on individuals or the interactions were certain slices. I think the beauty is actually putting things all together as well as you can. So I think it is really about what I just talked about as like not seeing design as just Should we use a six pixel border radius or four? But it's rather like, how do I design the most simple system fewest number of concepts, few as Code pass Do the most things for most people.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in Notion, that is really just blocks pages, databases, the workspace, and then everything kind of works around these concepts. And then at every layer, there's like a representation of them. There could be like, you know, at the very top is the UI where the brand or like the visuals, the aesthetics. But then there's actually the aesthetics, every layer, how you architect, say, like the front end code and architecture, how they reactive stays sync and how you render stuff to like how do you store these objects, how they relate to each other, to all the core concepts of the thing. If you look at software, it's like it's actually really simple. If you look at the concepts themselves. So design is kind of like trying to figure out what is the best configuration.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I want to call out is design is not just about aesthetics. It is actually like how I think of it It actually includes all the say the architectural designs or like all the concepts of what this thing is or like the company. For a notion, as an example. Notion is a pure conceptual product, meaning every single concept was designed by a person.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you can also assemble like a really good team. So, like, there's really good infra engineers, front-end engineers, PMs who are like, I don't know, not just running meetings, get all of them together, give them the same tool, the same code base. They can start covering each other's weaknesses. And then amplify their strength and the agent kind of holds everything and instead of you pinging this guy, ah, where is your design? It knows.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the whole thing. What we're trying to make better for people. But we're kind of going backwards now as they say tools like cursor. If you were self identified as a designer or developer or something, I used to also struggle with this. I started making stuff myself the whole thing. And then I came to the US, I got a job titled Product Designer. I stopped coding. I made marks and prototypes, and I waited for them to happen for like years, and they don't happen, or they ended up shipping as like a YouTube video. That's crazy But with this new tool a designer can build. They can actually work on their craft, the stuff that they really care about, make that really good, and let the rest be handled by the agent. Can kind of put their taste on top. And all the stuff that they don't want to worry about, give it to the agents.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say economic constraints where they were funded and they weren't like trying to make money as much. So they kind of made the whole thing really whole. And now it's like you kind of break everything down. You try to optimize them with Processes and cause optimizations and people become Boxed into little. Areas and problem sets when the whole thing is actually all together. And that causes a lot of problems, I think. Like people now make software that I don't know. They don't even think of. There's some ideal that's kind of lost, and then people think too much on the technical problems, the design problems, the money problems.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people always have their strength or their unique special skill or some spike. Say, like, some people are more good at coordinating, some people are good at the visual space, some people are maybe good at architecting the lower level constructs. I think of all of these people, I asked Joseph, like, Their software builders Makers, like we kind of started there. Like if you look back when The early computing era, there was no title or people were maybe like researchers, but they maybe designed the low-level architecture. They may be even built the UI and how to display the UI on the screen and the whole thing. Maybe one person or two or five. And when you did that, and also I think back then there were less.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build the spec for you, and then you can add details, you can change it as you want. But it's almost like I don't really believe in, say, you give the age and something long running or like it's really like occluded. A really non specific prompt and expected to give you exactly what you want. Like, it's just not going to work. There needs to be something for the human to specify what is good, what is right. How I want to do it. If you don't put in that opinion, it will just produce AI slop.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very different for each person. There is no right, there is no wrong. More dependent on, say, like Things that you've seen, it's almost like an LLM, but the problem with an LLM is like it actually has seen everything. It doesn't really have an opinion. Or, like, it kind of confused itself thinking that people prefer purple gradients everywhere. But what is good is like the element because it has seen a lot of things it can do the baseline really fast and really good. Then the thing on top is taste or like your self-selection of what is good like you're kind of drawing the boundary. That is your decision though the AI can increasingly help you do that. Say we have a new thing in cursor called plan mode If you type in the prompt and then you don't really want to fill in the details you can switch to plan go it will kind of”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really like people talking about taste as a word. Because I think it's so ambiguous. Like how I see it is more like. I think Teus is kind of. There's a part of Like you're selecting out of all the options. But in order to do that, you have to kind of see everything, or like you have seen it. You have maybe dug into the past, you have kind of figured out, oh, these are the ways people did this kind of thing. You made the connection of some stuff from the past where you've seen in nature or, I don't know, some human-made or nature made it. Then you kind of connected that to your thing or the thing you want to do or you kind of over time develop like a like a preference. It's almost like you're self-selecting a boundary of this is what is right. This is what is beautiful. This is what is good.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, like, what we want is there's like a base experience that almost works for anyone, anything, but you can get more specific if you know what you're doing or if you have specific needs, you can even maybe use cursor as if you were using Figma at some point in the future. But the difference is you are not interacting with these siloed apps with their own Format Then you don't have to do the conversion manually with meetings or whatever. Like it just does it. All you need to do is you're kind of thinking about the idea, you're like iterating on it in whatever way that is the best for you. For the engineer, it might be like a code editor, but maybe for a designer as something more visual. For the PM, it might be something more like a document.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could know the presence, which is maybe like what's in your code base, what are the actual running tasks or projects, even gathering feedback or information from the real world? It could be also from the past, say all the knowledge that you've accumulated, your team preferences, how the code base evolved in Git maybe. There's also the future, which is like say you're planning ahead, you're like thinking about the vision, you're maybe ideating some bigger ideas. Can actually do all of this with just one tool, one agent, but in mind, you know, for each individual user or team, it might take a different shape.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you do this jointly, there's so much back and forth collaboration issues. As you grow the team, it gets even more complex. People start breaking the software apart. Things are no longer simple, no longer unified. Like we always talk about, like you kind of ship your work chart type of thing. And then the different roles kind of fight. Like designers are right. The engineers are right. The PMs are right. There's this shared truth, which is the code where you can also gather a lot of information around putting everything synthesizing everything together, then the agent can kind of handle all these things that you might actually not know fully, but it kind of knows the truth.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like inertia to kind of change that where, like, Change people's tools or kind of. You can't really force anyone to Adopt something new that doesn't perfectly fit them. With AI, with cursor, things kind of flip again, because we want to kind of build something where it can kind of connect and absorb all of these artifacts and formats and later maybe even within cursor, like there could be different views of the same code. Like showing the code as raw code or like as diff is almost like just the very beginning. The act of making software is really just modifying the code. Like in some sense, like the PM writing the PRD is modifying the code, but they're doing it through a more passive organizational way. Maybe the designers influence it more individuals.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're saying yes. So I think Maybe, like, over the last, I don't know, 15 years or so, I think the Art of making software fragmented a lot, and then we kind of split into different roles. Each role kind of used their own tool, use their own artifact. They think in their own kind of words and lingo, say the designers are stuck in Figma before maybe it's like sketch there were actually like, you know, files. And then the PMs, maybe they're like just writing docs and running meetings. Maybe they're in Google Docs and say the data people maybe like, you know, some other tool. And then everyone's like kind of siloed in their own way. And then we need to kind of come up with a process to tie everything. Or like. Better tools to kind of unify everything. We tried that at Notion, but the problem is people have already developed so much habits.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that kind of changes the whole thing. It's like the tool not only impacts the individual software engineers, like for them, maybe for cursors, like we kind of try to fit as many workflows and people as we can. Say there's like people who depride themselves at really think thoroughly, write the most clean code. For those people, they can just type and then we do the tab thing. And the tab thing got really good at, like, it's almost like it knows what you want to do next. So for those people, they can do that. But there's like increasingly more people doing the agents where like even for the most professional coders, they start to do those new things.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I might get something that's maybe imperfect, not exactly what I want, but the process of iterating and like kind of poking at it becomes really quick. And then ask the agents evolve, as the models get better, as it talks to more tools, it understands visuals better, it can talk to Figma, the mocks that I had, it can talk to Notion, all the ideas, the dogs, the meeting notes, anything. And the most important thing is it knows the code base, which is the truth, the material of how we build software.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team, sometimes it takes even longer because say you're just a designer, you're doing some mocks and fig mod, and then you shared it out, you got some feedback. And your PM needs to do this like PRD thing and then run more meetings. And then there's like more people involved. And then they're like, it takes a long time. And then maybe like a year later your design came out, but then it's like 20% of what you wanted. With this new thing. With You can just say you have an idea. It might be a little ambiguous. You just tell it the agent. And then it might give you something maybe like 60%, 70% on the first shot Are you kind of skipped a lot of the complexities? We kind of transformed from like you need to understand all this thing, all these concepts of making software. Then you can do something to, I can do something now.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to me, it's like building software. There's like so many layers of abstractions and depth that you need to take care of. And in order to do something really great, you actually need to know everything. Or you assemble a team that works really well together with people with different strengths on every layer. Maybe you have the greatest infra-engineers, people doing ML. Maybe you have really good design engineers who really like they can just handwrite CSS and then they'll be like perfect. In order for, say, one person to do all of this or learn all of this, it takes a long time of trial and error. You have to build from the simplest things to gradually more complex, scale it up to more people, share your workout to the public, see what happens, do this feedback loop. And if you're doing it in a”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There needs to be something for the human to specify what is good, what is right, how I want to do it. If you don't put in that opinion, it will just produce AI slum. People will always have their strength or their unique special skill. I see AI almost like a universal interface. So design is kind of like trying to figure out what is the best configuration and the simplest state for all of us. The beauty is actually putting things all together.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the last, I don't know, 15 years or so, the art of making software fragmented a lot. And then we kind of split into different roles. Each role kind of used their own tool, use their own artifact. They think in their own kind of words and lingo. With cursor, things kind of flip again.”
2025-12-16 · a16z Podcast · Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source