If you’re a programmer, you probably think you can do just about anything a computer can do within Cursor lately, especially when combined with interactivity like Jupyter Notebooks.
Bringing Cursor to Creative Professionals
How do we make Cursor’s power accessible to professionals and creatives who don’t code?
The VS Code/Cursor layout is remarkably generalizable. If you break it down, you’ll notice that creative software has followed this pattern for decades:
The Future of Creative Tools
The current landscape of creative software - think Adobe Suite or Figma - is built around complex interfaces that require significant expertise to master. This complexity has created a peculiar dynamic where proficiency with the tool becomes a badge of honor, sometimes overshadowing the fundamental skills of good design - understanding perception and cognition.
A key insight for the next generation of creative tools is determining the minimum set of necessary precision editing tools that would be more efficient than simply using AI voice instructions. However, it’s important to note that for many design tasks - particularly interaction design and information architecture - visual tools still offer significant advantages over natural language interfaces. The ability to rapidly sketch and iterate through multiple visual versions often proves faster than describing layouts through text or voice.
As AI reshapes our tooling landscape, we’re seeing interesting patterns emerge:
- Incumbent products face a challenging dilemma:
- They’re incentivized to keep their existing user base
- They might only continue to offer AI as mere augmentation to their existing tool instead of risking a new learning curve
- Their complex interfaces are deeply coupled with their expert users’ mental models
- Developers have shown remarkable adaptability to new tools compared to other creative professionals
- This malleability for relearning and adopting better tooling sets them apart
- The success of Cursor demonstrates this willingness to embrace paradigm shifts
- The transformation we’ve seen with Cursor is likely to ripple through other creative domains:
- Audio editing (Audacity)
- Publishing (InDesign)
- Image manipulation (Photoshop)
- Interface design (Figma)
- Film editing (Final Cut Pro/Logic Pro)
- Writing (Word/Google Docs)
Importantly, there’s no guarantee that current market leaders will successfully navigate this transition. While AI-first tools like Cursor excel for functional, operation-focused software, they might not be ideal for applications where design innovation is central. The next generation of creative tools might need to be hybrid solutions that combine the efficiency of AI with the intuitive nature of visual design tools.
Collaboration Patterns
Another key distinction between programmers and other creative professionals lies in their collaboration preferences. Creative professionals often work with more intuitive, visual content that requires less cognitive load to evaluate. As a result, they tend to gravitate toward real-time collaboration tools rather than the asynchronous, version-control-based workflows (like Git) that developers prefer.
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The question is: how do you bring the power of Cursor to professionals and creatives in non-programming fields?
If you examine the design of Cursor, you’ll notice that the left sidebar serves as project navigation and version control, the center displays the artifact, the center bottom shows the output, and the right column functions as the composer/editor. This setup is quite generalizable.
The key is to determine the minimum set of precision editing tools that would be more efficient than simply using AI voice instructions, and it turns out that this set is relatively small.```
```So my personal experience is with Figma, but I think Adobe and Figma, these tools, the way they're formulated right now, their whole interface is one that has all these trained experts that are now just coupled with their overcomplicated user interface in terms of mental models. And I think it's almost like a matter of job retention pride in some ways to people that they know how to use Figma, which doesn't actually make them a good designer. A good designer is a lot more about understanding perception and cognition. So I think what's going to be interesting about this field is like all of the incumbent products are going to be incentivized to stay locked with these users or at best offer augmentation tools to these users. I think developers are some of the most malleable people when it comes to better tooling and for relearning in particular. Actually more than many other creative types. And so we saw the first movement happen with cursor, but it'll probably happen to Audacity. It'll probably happen to InDesign, Photoshop, Figma, all of these tools. And I'm not convinced that it's always going to be the incumbent that'll win. Product design is of course the area that I can suggest a lot of changes to. But there's probably stuff in filmmaking and music production as well. Writing.```
```Another key difference between programmers and other creatives is that since they work more in limbic brain content that is a lot less cognitive load to evaluate, they prefer realtime collaboration to the Git model of async collaboration.```
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```The idea would be cursor but for creatives. So think of it as whatever the next generation of Adobe's tools and Figma would evolve into with AI as a first-class citizen. Basically, you have artifacts that you're working on, whether that be a picture, a movie, or a graphic design piece. That's generally what Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, or whatever Adobe's version is, and InDesign map to as the main creative tools. There's a Figma for product design, and then writing is a much more fragmented space, which actually cursor might be the closest to, so there's not really a need for another product other than a skin and some model. That might be worth its own product as well. But the central idea is you have an artifact and then have a conversation. You then have the ability to essentially revise the artifact with a combination of AI first-draft tools and AI precision editing tools. The goal is to minimize the friction between a user saying a word or expressing something with the point-and-click interface and just being able to see the revised artifact while holding a lot of constraints that either come as best practices from that community of practitioners. Added onto that set are the best practices of particular designer, this team, this project, or this company. Those are essentially constraints that the system has to work with.```