Cursor CEO Warns Vibe Coding Builds on 'Shaky Foundations'

The creator of one of the most popular AI-assisted coding tools is warning against a method he himself helped popularize. Michael Truell, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor code editor, said that so-called vibe coding, building software without looking at the generated code, only works up to a point.

Truell described vibe coding as an approach in which a developer "closes their eyes and doesn't look at the code at all, just asks AI to build something for them." The term, popularized in 2025, describes working with language models in a mode of near-total trust, without reading or understanding what the model actually generated.

If you close your eyes, don't look at the code, and let AI build things on shaky foundations, and then you add another floor, and another, and another, at some point everything starts to crumble - Michael Truell, CEO of Anysphere

A house-building analogy

The Cursor chief used a simple comparison: putting up four walls and a roof without understanding how the wiring is routed or how the floors are built can work in the short term. The problem arises when you try to add more stories on top of that structure. In code, that means layers of features tacked on without understanding earlier architectural decisions, leading to a fragile, hard-to-maintain system.

Cursor, a product of Anysphere, is one of the most widely used large-language-model-based coding tools. Unlike pure vibe coding, where AI acts as a black box producing finished solutions, Cursor embeds an AI assistant directly in the development environment, so code suggestions draw on the context of the existing codebase while the developer still sees and reviews every line.

When the hands-off approach works

Truell doesn't dismiss the idea of fast, less controlled AI-assisted coding altogether. His reservations mainly concern more advanced projects, where architectural mistakes accumulate over time. For simple tasks, like quickly putting together a game prototype or a website, a fully automated approach can be enough, since the project's scale and complexity never grow large enough to expose weak foundations.

The difference between the two scenarios comes down to the stakes. A prototype meant to work once and disappear doesn't require the same discipline as a system a company will keep building on and maintaining for years. In the latter case, not understanding your own code means every subsequent change becomes riskier, and debugging turns into archaeology.

A growing problem

Truell's warning fits into a broader industry conversation about the quality of AI-generated code. More and more companies and engineering teams report a rise in bugs, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt stemming from widespread, uncritical use of coding assistants. At the same time, pressure to ship software faster increases the temptation to hand full control over to AI, especially at smaller teams and startups that lack the resources for thorough code review.

The Cursor chief's remarks carry particular weight in this context, since his company is one of the driving forces behind the popularization of AI-assisted coding. A warning coming from inside the industry, rather than from its critics, reads as a signal that even tool builders see the risk of excessive trust in automation.

What it means for Polish companies and developers

For Polish development teams, where according to earlier research the use of AI tools in day-to-day programming work is already widespread, Truell's words are a practical pointer, not just a curiosity from across the ocean. The distinction between rapid prototyping and building production systems should translate into concrete team rules: code review remains mandatory wherever code goes into production, regardless of whether it was written by a human or a language model.

Technology companies are increasingly rolling out internal policies defining when it's acceptable to code without detailed review of AI-generated output, and when full engineer oversight is required. The Cursor chief's comments could accelerate the formalization of such rules, especially at companies that have so far treated the issue as an afterthought.

Truell stressed that his criticism isn't aimed at the idea of using AI in programming itself, but at a specific, extreme variant in which the developer gives up any insight into the code at all. Cursor as a product is meant to answer that problem, offering a way of working in which AI speeds up writing code without replacing a human's understanding of it.