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Eric Zakariasson

Engineer at cursor working on developer experience and product. Internal dogfooder of Cursor's own agent stack — runs 5–10 cloud agents in parallel against Cursor's production repo, using the stack to build the stack.

Role & approach

  • Self-described as at "developer level 4" on Dan Shapiro's levels-of-autonomy-shapiro ladder: delegates as much as possible to agents, reviews agent output more than code.
  • Forces personal constraints in side projects — e.g. music-agent project where he "never wrote any code myself" — to discover what scaffolding the factory actually needs.
  • Works across ~4 different repos/areas simultaneously; context-switches between async cloud agents and one synchronous task.

Operating pattern

  • Plan synchronously, execute asynchronously — front-loads intent into long specs/plans, then spawns cloud agents to run them out.
  • Uses isolated VMs per agent (not shared git worktrees) for independence — more expensive but scales to hundreds/thousands of parallel agents.
  • Mixes agent work with "casual scrolling on Twitter" while waiting — explicit about the rhythm shift from coder to manager.

Key claims

  • "The 10x engineer is no longer about words per minute. It's tokens to token usage." Comp conversation at Cursor already joking about being "paid in tokens."
  • Describes the shift as becoming "somewhere between a product manager and an architect" — writing less code, setting more intent.
  • On agent-native IDE: Cursor 3 is a full rewrite abandoning the VS Code base — because "we are using more agents and we need a better control panel."

Cross-references