Joining Cursor

When I entered university in 2023, an upper-year cautioned me to not get comfortable with traditional software engineering.

“When you graduate, you will enter the workforce in a post-AGI world.”

I didn’t think much of it then, but now, I understand what he meant by this warning.

I’m 20 years old, studying Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. If I continue my current path, I would graduate in May 2028 (2.5 years from now).

We are currently in a period of the greatest technological advancements since the dot-com boom. Models have ingrained themselves deeply into our lives and the way we interact with tools seems to constantly be changing. Labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer startups competing on novelty; they are becoming the world’s infrastructure. The question is no longer what is possible with AI, but who defines the interfaces through which it’s used.

Today, the fundamental software development process is changing. Not only is the amount of code humans write decreasing, but the way human engineers think through, explore and implement solutions shifts. If I wait until graduation to build meaningful and intentional software, I will have missed the most important period in the field of software development.

That’s why I’m dropping out of school and joining Cursor.

I’m excited to help build out the core product and build new interfaces to interact with agents as a software engineer. Cursor has the strongest product team on the planet right now. They are one of the few large companies that still move like a startup; despite their size, they ship fast, sometimes uncomfortably so. That pace allows for a level of learning that school just can’t provide.

There’s never been a more exciting time to work on coding agents. In the long run, winners aren’t crowned by hype, but by habit. The goal is to build a tasteful product people habitually live by. For the past 2 years, no matter what agent I’ve used (Claude Code, Codex or Cursor Agent), I’ve always used them in Cursor. It’s a privilege to also be the end-user of a product that you’re developing.

While it is unclear what the next interface will look like or who wins the market, what matters is being close to the frontier. I need to be close enough to help shape how software is built if I want to have any say in what it means to be a software engineer.