Cursor's head of design, Ryo Lu, hints at what an AI-native company is.
Building software ultimately means changing code. PM specs and designer mockups are only indirect tools for changing code. Cursor reduces unnecessary translation and misunderstanding by letting everyone share the truth at the center of all of this: code itself.
We do not see design as an aesthetic act of making buttons pretty or pushing pixels around. Design is the act of designing the simplest and most powerful concepts. Notion may look like a note-taking app, but at its core it is a system made of a few key concepts: blocks, pages, and databases. If those concepts are designed well, users can combine them to build websites, project-management tools, and much more.
AI cannot have opinions of its own, so without human intervention it only produces average outputs. If you do not inject your own opinions, AI will only produce AI slop. What you need to layer on top is your taste, your own line for what is good and what is right.
An AI-native company is one where everything is code. The company itself is software.
