First of Kind Ryo Lu: The Way
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Feb 18, 2026 
Ryo Lu, founding designer at Notion and current design lead at Cursor, blends design and engineering to rethink how software is built. He discusses collaborative workflows where engineers design, building Cursor inside Cursor, the rise of agentic interfaces, and a pattern language of composable primitives. He also outlines the evolving role of designers and why learning Cursor matters for builders.
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Hire Generalists Who Ship
- Cursor hires generalists and ex-founders who take ownership and blur role boundaries.
- These people collaborate directly on code and treat product problems as shared, not siloed tasks.
Dogfooding With Side Projects
- Cursor team members dogfood the product by building side projects like a 3D Minecraft and a personal OS.
- Those playful prototypes inform product improvements through a self-improving loop between use and tooling.
Agents Raise Abstraction, Create Bottlenecks
- Agents raise the abstraction layer from typing code to planning and coordinating multiple tasks.
- The new UI challenge is helping humans manage many autonomous agents without becoming the bottleneck.