Dev Propulsion Labs David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast
David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast
David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own.
Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable.
00:00 Introduction and guest welcome
01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption
03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers
05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding
07:36 Having personalized workflows
08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor
10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice
14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs
15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America
19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF
26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal
29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition
32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal
39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers
42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths
44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy
46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions
47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters
48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers