Building Cursor: AI-Native Development Tools
Sualeh Asif
Stanford CS153: Technology Entrepreneurship — Infra @ Scale (Winter 2025) · Day 6 · Jordan Hall 420-040
In this insightful talk at CS153 Infra @ Scale 2025, Sualeh Asif, CTO and Co-Founder of Cursor, provided an unfiltered, deep dive into the formidable infrastructure powering Cursor, an AI-native development tool that has scaled by a factor of 100 or more within the last year. The discussion illuminated the intricate challenges and innovative solutions involved in building and maintaining a global-scale AI coding platform, from managing massive inference workloads to navigating the complexities of distributed databases and third-party model providers.
AI review
Sualeh Asif gives a genuinely useful infrastructure war-story talk — not a product pitch, not a research paper, but an honest account of what it actually looks like to run a write-heavy, latency-sensitive AI product at scale. The PostgreSQL MVCC gotcha, the YugabyteDB failure, and the DynamoDB cache miss / Merkle tree race condition cascade are all concrete, named, reproducible failure modes. This is the kind of talk that saves teams from making the same mistakes.