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.

https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.

https://evilmartians.com/

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.

https://www.trychroma.com

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