Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers

Ryo Lu spent years watching his designs die in meetings. Then he discovered the tool that lets designers ship code at the speed of thought: Cursor, the company where Ryo is now Head of Design. In this episode, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li sits down with Ryo to discuss why "taste" is the wrong framework for understanding the future, why purposeful apps are "selfish," how System 7 holds secrets about AI interfaces, and the radical bet that one codebase can serve everyone if you design the concepts right instead of the buttons.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 use their own tool, use their own artifact. They think in their own kind of words and lingo. With Cursor, things kind of flip again.

• 0:19Jennifer Li?

  For the first time, that design is such an approachable concept and skill set to a lot more people. And it brings together sort of people who have aspirations for design and wanting to build things, wanting to prototype things, putting beautiful stuff out in the world.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  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's law. People will always have their strength or their unique, special skill. I see AI almost like, it's 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.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  What happens when the designer becomes the developer? When mockups that used to die in Figma can suddenly become living products in minutes? My guests today are Jennifer Lee, general partner at A16Z, and Rio Lu, head of design at Cursor, the AI code editor that's collapsing the traditional boundaries between design and engineering. Rio spent years at Notion and Asana, watching his designs get stuck in endless meetings and handoffs. Now he's building tools that let designers ship real software themselves. We're exploring how AI is ending the era of fragmented teams, why taste isn't really worth talking about, and what it means when a single person could do what used to take an entire product team.

• 1:51Erik Torenberg?

  Rio, welcome to the A C N C podcast.

• 1:54Erik Torenberg?

  Jennifer, you've been thinking a lot about sort of evolution of design, evolution as it relates to infra as well as software development. Why don't you talk about what got you so excited about having Rio and, you know, why we have this conversation?

• 2:07Jennifer Li?

  Rio and I got to know each other over the past few months, talking about how large language models and AI tools are going to impact not just designers, design engineers, and how people are building prototypes and coming up with great ideas. I feel like for the first time that design is such an approachable concept and skillset to a lot more people. And it brings together sort of people who have aspirations for design and wanting to build things, wanting to prototype things, putting beautiful stuff out in the world much, much easier and faster. So Rio has gone through a lot of thinking and journey of, you know, what design means, what design means in the sense of having Cursor being part of like the building blocks of it.

• 2:51Jennifer Li?

  Like, I just really wanted to have him on the podcast and talk about the future of both coding and design.

• 2:59Erik Torenberg?

  Rio, you've been at Notion now, obviously, head of design at Cursor. Why don't you take us through your journey and how you've been thinking about some of these topics?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  I think to me, it's like building software.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  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 like assemble a team that works really well together with, you know, people with different strengths on every layer. Maybe you have the greatest infra engineers, people doing ML. Maybe you have, you know, really good design engineers who really, like, they can just handwrite CSS and then they'll be like perfect.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  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, you know, gradually more complex, scale it up to more people. Share your work out to the public, see what happens, do this feedback loop. And if you're doing it in a team... Sometimes it takes even longer because say you're just a designer. You're doing some mocks in Figma and then you shared it out, you got some feedback. Then 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, and it takes a long time.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  And then maybe like a year later, your design came out, but then it's like 20% of what you wanted. But with this new thing, so with Cursor, you can just say you have an idea, it might be a little ambiguous. You just tell it to tell the agent and then it might give you something maybe like 60%, 70% on the first shot. But you kind of skipped a lot of the complexities. We kind of transformed from like you need to understand all these things, all these concepts of making software.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Then you can do something to, I can do something now. 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 as 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 docs, the meeting notes, anything. And the most important thing is it knows the codebase, which is the truth, the material of how we built software.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  So that kind of changes the whole thing. It's like the tool not only, you know, impacts the individual software engineers. Like for them, maybe like for cursors, like we kind of try to fit as many workflows and people as we can. Say there's like people who they pride themselves at like, you know, 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. Um, so for those people, they can do that. But there's like increasingly more people doing the agents.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Um, where like even for the most professional coders, they start to do this new thing.

• 6:54Jennifer Li?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:55Jennifer Li?

  I am trying to think of even myself as a, as an example. Prior to joining the firm, I was on the product side. I was working with a lot of designing designers, design engineering teams. Back then it wasn't called that way. It's more like designers, front end engineers, uh, and then UX designers too. Um, it was still very disjointed workflows, like, you know, a lot of the, the design work happens more in isolated fashion with just the designers themselves, like they spend two weeks coming up with a concept.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:29Jennifer Li?

  What does the UI look like? And work with design, UX designers on what the UX look like? And then hand it off to the product team and works with engineers. Think already bring that sort of process a lot closer that you can collaborate around one artifact that everybody can give impulse and prototype and bring sort of more of a close to um, uh, the reality artifacts into, into, uh, these people's hands. Where with cursor, it's even one step closer is you can actually poke around and play with, uh, these artifacts that are functional and working. I'm curious, what does it mean for collaboration among these teams?

• 8:13Jennifer Li?

  As you're mentioning, um, that the collapse of that iteration, um, and a speed. Uh, and also what does, what does it mean for the different roles that's involved in design?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Yes. So I think.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Maybe like over the last, I don't know, fifteen years or so, I think the the art of making software fragmented a lot. And then we kind of split into different roles. Each role kind of use 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 the PMs, maybe they're like just writing docs and running meetings. Or 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. Uh, or like

• 9:16Speaker 00

  build better tools to kind of unify everything. We tried that at Notion. But the problem is like people have like already developed like so much like habits. There's like inertia to kind of change that or like change people's tools. Um, or like kind of

• 9:40Speaker 00

  like you can't really force anyone to

• 9:44Speaker 00

  like adopt something new. That doesn't perfectly fit them.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  But with AI, with no, uh, with Cursor, things kind of flip again. Cause we want to kind of build something where it can kind of, you know, connect and absorb all of these artifacts. Um, and formats. And later, maybe even like within Cursor, like there could be different views of the same code, like showing the code as raw code or like as this. It's almost like just the very beginning.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  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, like organizational way. Maybe the designers influence it more on the visuals.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But when you do this, you know, destroying to lead, there's so much like back and forth collaboration issues. As you grow the team, it gets even more complex. People start like 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. But like, you know, there is this shared truth, which is the code. Where like, you know, you can also gather a lot of information around. Putting everything, synthesizing everything together.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Then the agent can kind of handle all these things that you might actually not know fully. But it kind of, you know, knows the truth. It could know the presence, which is maybe like, you know, what's in your codebase? What are the actual, you know, running tasks or projects? Even gathering feedback or information from the real world. It could be also like, you know, from the past. Say like all the knowledge that you've accumulated. Your team preferences, your, like how the codebase evolved in goods, maybe. There's also the future, which is like, say you're planning ahead. You're like thinking about the vision.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  You're maybe like ideating some like bigger ideas. You 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. And then like what we want is like, there's like a basic 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, you know, use cursor as if you were using Figma at some point in the future. But the difference is you're not interacting with these siloed apps

• 12:54Speaker 00

  with their own like formats. And then you don't have to do the conversion manually with meetings or whatever. Like it just does it. Then 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 for the engineer, it might be like a code editor. But maybe for a designer, it's something more visual. For the PM, it might be something more like a document.

• 13:25Jennifer Li?

  That makes sense. I'm curious, given that there's a lot more focus and emphasis on this concept of taste after AI comes about. And now there's also this coworker that's an agent helping with writing code, designing elements of the product. Where would the taste live? Where does that come from? Can you rely on agents for having good taste? Is that still heavily reliant on the creator as the human designer or developer?

• 13:57Speaker 00

  I don't really like people talking about taste as a word.

• 14:01Jennifer Li?

  Why is that?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Because I think it's so ambiguous. Like how I see it is more like, I think taste is kind of like there's a part of,

• 14:14Speaker 00

  like you're selecting out of, you know, all the options.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  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 a connection of, you know, some some stuff from the past where you've seen in nature where, I don't know, some human made it or nature made it. And then you kind of connect that to to your thing or the thing you want to do.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Or you kind of over time do 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.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  And I think it's very different for each person. There is no right, there is no wrong.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  It's more dependent on, say, like.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  The things that you've seen, it's almost like an L L M. But the problem with an L L M is like it actually has seen everything. And it doesn't really have an opinion. Or like it kind of confused itself thinking that people prefer purple gradients everywhere.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  But what is good is like the L L M 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 A I 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 just build the spec for you. And then you can add details, you can change it as you want.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  But it's almost like I don't really believe in, say, you give the agent something long running or like it's really like occluded.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Like a really non-specific prompt and then expect it to give you exactly what you want. Like it's just not gonna 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 A I slop.

• 17:02Erik Torenberg?

  You were alluding earlier to this sort of, you know, fight between product managers, designers and engineers to some, or this sort of dance. And then if you were saying a few years ago, the categories were somewhat different. As there is this blurring. How do you think these categories will evolve with you?

• 17:22Speaker 00

  I think like people will always have their strengths 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, like, you know, the lower level constructs.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  But I think of all of these people as just like, like they're software builders or makers. Like, we kind of started there. Like, if you look back when, so like the early computing era, there was no title or people were maybe like researchers or like, but they, they maybe designed a low-level architecture. They maybe even, you know, built the UI and how to display the UI on the screen. And the whole thing. Maybe one person or two or five.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  And when you did that, and also, I think back then, there were like less, 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 like processes and cost optimizations. And people have become like, you know, boxed into little areas and problem sets when the whole thing is actually all together.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  And that causes a lot of problems, I think. Like, people, people now make software that,

• 19:12Speaker 00

  I don't know. Like, they don't even think of, like...

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Like there's some like ideal that's kind of lost and people think too much on the technical problems, the design problems, the money problems. Not the whole thing, or what we're trying to make better for people. But, you know, we're kind of going backwards now. As, you know, they say tools like Cursor.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  If you were, you know, self-identified as a designer or developer or something. Like, I used to also struggle with this. I started like making stuff myself, the whole thing. And then I came to the US, I got a job titled product designer. I, I stopped coding. I made mocks and prototypes. And I waited for them to happen for like years. And they don't happen, or like they ended up shipping as like a YouTube video. That's crazy.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  But, you know, with this new tool, a designer can build. They can actually like, you know, work on their craft. The, the stuff that they really care about, make that really good. And then let the rest, you know, be handled by the agents. They can, you know, kind of put their taste on top. And all the stuff that they don't want to worry about, give it to the agents.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  But you can also assemble like a really good team. So like, there's like 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 codebase. They can start covering each other's like, you know, weaknesses. And then amplify their strength. And the agent kind of holds everything. And, you know, instead of you pinging this guy, ah, where is your design? It knows.

• 21:24Jennifer Li?

  Yeah, that resolves a lot of the common conflicts of spending more effort on the functional part of the software or spending more time on the artistic aesthetic side of the product itself and being appealing to the users. And you have worked at many of the very design-focused, design-centric companies, from Notion to even prior to that. Asana, like now, given sort of

• 21:53Jennifer Li?

  the demarketization of who can touch that external-facing

• 22:01Jennifer Li?

  aesthetic part of the product. How do you think about influencing even, I guess, your current team and people at Cursor to spend more effort in thinking about that versus just the functional part of the product itself?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, one thing I want to call out is, design is not just about aesthetics. It is actually, like, how I think of it is, like, it's all, it actually includes all, to say, the architectural designs or like all the concepts of what this thing is. Or like the company even. Say,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  for Notion as an example, Notion is a pure conceptual product, meaning every single concept was designed by a person.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  So like in Notion, it 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, it's like the UI or like the brand or like the visuals, the aesthetics. But then there's actually the aesthetics every layer. How you architect, say, like the frontend code and architecture, how they, you know, how the reactive states sync and how you render stuff. To like, how do you like store these objects? How they, you know, relate to each other to all the core concepts of the thing.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  And if you look at software, it's like, it's actually really simple. If you look at the concepts themselves.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  So design is kind of like trying to figure out what is the best configuration and the simplest state for all of us. Some people maybe only focus on the visuals or the interactions or certain slices. But I think the 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. It's like not seeing design as just, should we use a six pixel border radius or four?

• 24:13Speaker 00

  But it's rather like, how do I design the most simple system, fewest number of concepts, fewest code paths to do the most things for most people?

• 24:29Erik Torenberg?

  You, you guys obviously have incredible product market fit with developers. And we've alluded to a bunch of it, but can you share more about maybe either how you guys have navigated the idea maze of how you want to serve designers? Or just more around what what kind of tooling you you think there's an opportunity to provide?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah. So I think

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Cursor like is still like our primary focus is on professional developers and teams.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  But because of that, like people around them are already here.

• 25:06Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  And I think for the longest time, we've been actually intentionally making Cursor pretty hard to get in for, say, the non-technical people.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  But they're here now and they actually struggle to get in and they really want to get in.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  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 or like a non-technical 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 like kind of NJS-adjacent people who are,

• 26:08Speaker 00

  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 like feeling like, ah, this is like a code editor, it's an IDE. It is more like I can start doing things. And then as I start doing things, I can maybe like pick the paths that I prefer. Say like a designer, maybe, maybe they're just like kind of chatting with the browser next to it. As the agent is like making edits, they can kind of preview the changes.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  They can maybe like 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 say creating new products or splitting Cursor. That is the same thing, but just like different pre-configurations and packaging of the same thing. Cause like, kind of like what I just said, like thinking about the concepts, like Cursor itself is actually really simple. Or like AI agents in general are pretty simple. What you want to do is actually like...

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Not, um.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Like if you look at, I don't know, like a ChatGPT agent versus like a Cursor versus like a Replid, a V0, a Notion agent even. The architecture or how they work are, like they're almost the same.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  So what if we can come up with like a set of, you know, universal shared concepts for interacting with AI, with agents, with code, with software.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  But you can kind of mutate each, each one to fit more people and to fit more use cases.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  And then each of them can leverage, say, 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.

• 28:29Jennifer Li?

  This leads to my question of over the last few years, and I don't know if it's few years or a decade, there is the concept of purpose-built tools for certain persona, whether it's that flow for, you know, persona or use cases like for landing pages, for sale, V0 for more of the, you know, front-end developers building, building, uh, next.js apps. There is tools for designers, there are tools from handoff from design to engineering, where now there's more of a concept of the everything app. ChatGPT is kind of everything app. Notion is kind of everything app. You can go to it for your note-taking, but you can also publish Notion pages.

• 29:13Jennifer Li?

  Cursor is becoming more of a everything app. Is that a path that we're going down towards of having these all-encompassing apps that can do a lot more things that used to be captured by a single purpose app? Is there still a place for purpose-built tools for a specific use case or persona? How do you see that?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:32Jennifer Li?

  Dynamic?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I think it's just like different philosophies of doing things and making software.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I think there's like, almost like two ways you can look at the thing. There is this.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Like the user-centric, human-centered design path, which is, you know, you start from a problem. You identify the group of people who have this problem, figure out, you know, what they want, build really specific solutions for them. Versus 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, hmm, where do I tweak a little bit to satisfy this constraint? Or to make this use case work? Or to enable this tool to work for these people?

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I think it's like fundamentally two different philosophies. And then I think it is much easier to do the, say, the user-centric way. 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. And 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.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  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 file formats, creating islands. When, if you look at the thing, like all these purposeful app, whatever. So I also work at Asana. Asana, the core concepts are really tasks and projects. Everything around tasks and projects. Everything they add needs to work with those.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  And that naturally limits what it can do. Versus say like Notion. Like how we see Notion, it is not note taking. It is disguised as note taking.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Like you come in, you can start from a blank page, you can type. But then what you're doing is actually like, you know, 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, you know, the layout and the type it is. And then you can put them in a database. Now they have, you know, 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, you know,

• 33:00Speaker 00

  for these more universal type of apps, it's like, because 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 tasks and projects. So there's always that tension. But it is fixable. You can build better packaging, you can use AI.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  So I think there's just, like my personal preferences, I would try to build something that works better for everyone. Than just, ah, this, 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.

• 33:57Jennifer Li?

  We talk about AI, we talk about agents, and we talk about how it really speeds up building things and prototyping. But when it really comes to these type of, you know, helping users to understand a product better, onboarding, learning the new concepts. Also to you as a designer, as a leader, how does like interacting with AI really improves the usability utility of the products?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I see AI almost like it's almost like a universal interface.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And then the 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. Um, 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 like, you completely transform this layer. It's not chat, it's not like an input. It's more fitted to, say, it's more purposeful even. Um, but underneath it is still the same thing. It is still the same AI, same agent, same architecture, same like you can flip different models and prompts and stuff.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  But then fundamentally, that that is what it is. But because of that, you can actually build a lot of different layers and shapes. Then each person can find the shape that fits them and it will feel more comfortable. Um, but also there is always this like baseline thing, which is it's just in 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.

• 35:57Jennifer Li?

  Does every software from now on becomes a chat box to begin with? And what's the role of UX design plays in that?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think like imagine, um, there is only chat. I think that will also be like a really bad experience. Cause you know, 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. As 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, ah, this is not for me, this is bad.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Um, but I think there's.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  There's so much potential where like I think the models today can 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

• 37:05Speaker 00

  transform that input-output into the form or format or views or workflows of the people, you know, today. Get them through that thing to 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 what, how it works. It feels kind of scary. Ah, what do I do? You know, 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 cases.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Cause I, I know, like, I, I just don't want to like typing a question every time or ah, it's give me like this wall of text of text response I need to like read.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Versus say like, uh, your, you know, the lines that you auto-complete just appears, you just press tab. Or like maybe I just select some element in my artboard and say, ah, make four variants of it and boom, it's there.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  But underneath is the same thing.

• 38:20Jennifer Li?

  On this question, um, I, I have, um, one more, one more thought is, um, when, when thinking about creativity, a lot of times when you have more constraints and more guardrails, it's actually more of a friend to, uh, to bring to creativity than not. Whereas now we have a much more open-ended world, we have a much more capable, um, tool that we can explore a lot more unconstrained domain and fashions. How do you still try to apply constraint, I guess, in your, um, line of work?

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:56Jennifer Li?

  And how do you think the software itself, now that we have, uh, this open chat window and chat box that can still bring that constraints in to give the builders more inspirations and creativity?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  I think the biggest constraint is

• 39:22Speaker 00

  it's kind of like simplicity in a sense.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Meaning

• 39:32Speaker 00

  like there's a limit of how much

• 39:36Speaker 00

  concepts or things you can expose to any given individual at any given time for them to kind of figure things out.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So there is a natural constraint on that side. For example, like on the cognitive side, there's maybe like a constraint on space. So like cursor, the window, you can stretch it like this or a 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 you can kind of accommodate more things. Say like there's secondary level things that maybe some people want to do.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Maybe it's like more specific modes of operations or parts of the workflow. Maybe it is like

• 40:36Speaker 00

  for different kinds of individual or preferences.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  But they are still like

• 40:44Speaker 00

  kind of layers of the core concepts or things. They're not kind of linearly like additive. Throw out all at you at once.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And I think that the interface where how software manifests themselves or how we design it even, it will start becoming less about, say, the designer decides, 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 of 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.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Then it's like the designer, what they're really thinking about is

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Like what are the most important concepts? How do they relate to each other? At 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 or the the different archetypes of what you can do. But the default should still stay simple. And then the ideal is like a lot of the tools,

• 42:25Speaker 00

  they don't really tell you what's going on or how the things work.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  One example is like, you know, 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.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  And then you're kind of delegating everything to the agent. You don't really know how things work. Versus for cursors, like 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 like different model preferences and which tools I want, which prompts I want. You can pick like, uh, maybe like instead of viewing just code, I want like a preview. I want like a dock 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.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  And then the designers, what they're really doing is they're thinking of what is the minimal set of abstractions? The system to kind of.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Handle all of these permutations.

• 43:39Jennifer Li?

  I love that concept of you're not just seeing the tool itself as a tool, but it's actually a toolbox where you can customize and configure it to fit your purpose and build your own tool. That, you know, fits your workflow and give a ton of flexibility to the end user. That's sort of the ethos of Cursor and Notion. That the more you unpack from the beginning, there's more to come.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's more to play and tinker.

• 44:07Jennifer Li?

  Right.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Because I think there's a lot of us who are actually really into that kind of stuff.

• 44:11Jennifer Li?

  For sure. Rio, you have an impeccable taste and sense of design. I'm very curious, on your day to day life, how do you cultivate your environment, the surrounding environments, your own surroundings to continue to find inspirations and bring the best design out to the world?

• 44:36Jennifer Li?

  Are there things you do, practices you want to share with the audience?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  I don't really have like a routine or like a kind of sporadic.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Like I don't sit in Figma all day and making mocks.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  I like.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  It's like doing everything at once type of vibe. So like I might be thinking about a like longer problem.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  I would maybe like just write. I like writing and kind of thinking in bullets. I would like go out of the office on a walk and then take my phone with like a Notion page and I would just start writing. I'll make sketches.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Maybe play in the visual space. Or maybe like, you know, build a prototype and code.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  A lot of my inspirations come from

• 45:52Speaker 00

  it's like not forcing it and kind of leaving some blank space to let things simmer.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  A lot of it comes from

• 46:06Speaker 00

  like just looking at stuff or

• 46:10Speaker 00

  looking at everything, not just software. So like you can look at print design, graphic design, motion, films, music, art, anything that humans made. The nature side of things are really cool, too. Like, learning about natural systems. I have a biomage. So like, there's a lot of similarities in like, you know, how many layers of things you can build, how they interact with each other.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Looking at the past helps a lot.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  So like, my real OS project kind of started from

• 46:51Speaker 00

  like, last year, I was just like, I bought a bunch of old Macs and iPods. And I was just playing with them. And I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings.

• 47:06Jennifer Li?

  I actually really want to ask about that because a lot of, you know, designers' profile page has the most shiny, forward-looking, futuristic designs where you have like, I don't know which year it is, like a macOS interface with like the original version of iPod icon.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 47:27Jennifer Li?

  Tell us more about about the real OS project.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I started the thing from so I was leaving Notion and I make noises when I am in meetings. So like, oh, no, we're

• 47:41Speaker 00

  It's all the same thing, stuff like that. And I wanted to make them a little gift. So I built like a soundboard app with Cursor. It was just one app. Like it looked like really bad, like Tailwind default styles. And then I just said, hmm, what if we like made it more like retro macOS-y? And then they put it in like a almost like a more retro macOS type window.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Basically like put it in a box.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  And then I'm like, hmm, add a menu bar. And then I added it on on top.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Then I'm like, hmm, 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. Yeah. But a lot of the interfaces that I created, I started from it's like, it's kind of inspired from System 7.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  There is like accuracy, but also like I added some like future stuff in it.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  And then I actually made like more themes. I added like 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 the OS, it feels really authentic to each, but then it's actually the same thing. So that's kind of like the the message I want to kind of tell people is like

• 49:20Speaker 00

  we've been almost doing the same thing over and over again from the very beginning. But maybe given, you know, the technical constraints of each era,

• 49:30Speaker 00

  there's like just, that's how it ended, ended there and how it ended, how it came to be.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Um, but we kind of carried a lot of these concepts and patterns over to even now. And then we, we are actually still living in it.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  And I don't think things will change that much. Meaning, um, there is these like timeless things that don't change much.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  And

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Like it kind of all comes back to,

• 50:11Speaker 00

  people were trying to come up with some really familiar ideas, and then bringing them to like a new medium.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  But we're doing the same thing again. We're 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, you know, different, different concepts that we put in little pictures. The icons, the desktop, like none of that really changed.

• 50:45Jennifer Li?

  Yeah, the timeless concepts and software we're using is the browser, the, the player, the, uh, the chat windows, and those are all on the, on the real OS, um, project. So for the audience who want to check it out, it's at real dot Lu.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Yes, OS dot real dot Lu.

• 51:05Jennifer Li?

  OS dot real dot Lu. Awesome. We'll wrap there. Thank you so much, Real, for, for coming. This is awesome.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z dot com forward slash disclosures.