It's interesting to me that we haven't experimented in some sense that much with the paradigm of programming over the past 20 years.

You put those together, you now have the ability to, again at the kind of level of the individual cell, to read, think and to write.

And this starts to really feel like a new kind of touring loop and to have its own sort of completeness.

I think that's a case where the right API design, the right abstraction design,

ended up having just quite significant business ramifications.

I think the basic idea of as development environment and not just text editor is really

the right idea. And that's the thing I want

to see a return to. Patrick Collison wrote his first startup in Smalltalk. Its development environment

let him fix errors mid-request, inspect stack frames, and resume execution. And he wanted that more

than he wanted a mainstream language. He and his brother chose Ruby and MongoDB for Stripe instead.

Those decisions still define the company 15 years and 44 seconds of annual downtime later.

Now Stripe is shipping V2 APIs, rewriting core abstractions first designed in 2010.

It's taken years.

Defining the new APIs is the easy part. Making them

work alongside everything already built on the old ones is, as Collison put it, more like an

instruction set migration than a product launch. This conversation previously aired on Cursor's

podcast also gets into why AI hasn't moved productivity numbers, what today's dev environment could steal from LISP machines,

and Collison's work at Arc on foundational models for biology.

Michael Truel, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe.

Well, it's great to have you.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me.

Great to be here.

...