Michael Truell (CEO of Cursor) sits down with Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) to discuss programming languages, the role of AI in programming, and building long-lasting software.
00:15 Why Patrick wrote his first startup in Smalltalk
03:35 LISP chatbots
06:09 Good ideas from esoteric programming languages
09:12 Brett Victor and Dynamicland
16:37 Programming human organizations
20:28 A codebase's "Big Bang" moment and MongoDB
25:49 Rewriting Stripe
32:00 How do you, Patrick Collison, use AI?
38:25 Changes to GDP/TFP
41:56 Programming human biology
46:10 Unexpected beneficiaries of AI
What does it really take to train an AI to write great code? In this roundtable conversation, some of the founders and researchers at Cursor explore the process of building superhuman AI coding agents — from infinite context models and the best rewards to real-time RL and scaling to millions of environments.This is an inside look at some of the work behind Cursor and what AI-assisted coding might look like in the future.