Everyone Is Asking What AI Can Do, but Cursor's Design Lead Asked the Opposite Question

Ryo Lu gave a talk at aiDotEngineer Shanghai.

He is the design lead at Cursor (Anysphere), and had long been part of the design world, having done design work at Stripe and Notion. The title of this talk can be roughly translated into one sentence: When we can do anything, do we still know what we want?

This was the core question raised by the entire talk.

Most discussion about AI right now is focused on capabilities: the model can write code now, generate video now, operate the browser for you now. Each one is answering "what can it do." Ryo Lu flipped the question: once tools push the threshold for execution down to almost zero, the judgment of what to do, why do it, and what it should look like becomes more expensive instead.

He mentioned a detail in his tweet: every slide in the entire talk was made by hand in Keynote. At a moment when people can't wait to have even PPT generated by AI, this action itself is a statement.

The video has bilingual Chinese-English subtitles and runs about 20 minutes.

Original tweet link: https://x.com/dotey/status/2119675421486641652