Transcript
A (0:00)
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 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.
B (0:19)
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.
A (0:34)
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. 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.
C (1:12)
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 Liu, 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 Rio, welcome to the Async podcast. Jennifer, you've been thinking a lot about sort of evolution of design, sort of 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, while we have this.
B (2:06)
Conversation, 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 what design means, what design Means in the sense of having cursor being part of the building blocks of it. I just really wanted to have him on the podcast and talk about the future of both coding and design.
