Ryo Lu - Start without knowing WTF you are doing

"Like how I learned is really by just making stuff, building things without knowing what the fuck I'm doing. Like I did not know the concept, the words. I just I want to do this. I'll just figure out how to do it. Use whatever tool that's there. And then you learn by doing that."

I stumbled on this interview while searching YouTube tutorials about Cursor, Claude MCP, and other AI coding tools:

Ryo Lu is Head of Design at Cursor—a tool I am not using much because I'm stuck in VS Code with Claude Code. In some ways I think Cursor is better, but being honest, I can’t deal with every subscription to every AI tool 😭. Cursor includes a visual editor for frontend tweaking that makes the whole process way more intuitive. But beyond the tool talk, what actually got me about this interview is how it changes the whole concept of building products. He basically says: skip it. Just start building.

Why this matters IMO: Cuts through all the framework/theory bullshit. Just build. It cuts through all the mental masturbation about frameworks and design theory without actually building.

Instead of wasting time designing perfect mockups in Figma, ask the AI to build something imperfect but real (actual working code), then sculpt and refine that result until it's exactly what you want - you're molding something that exists, not painting pixels that aren't real.

Other Important Thoughts from the Talk

On the changing role of designers:

• "My personal KPI at cursor this year is to turn all the designers into coders. The roles will start blurring. The designers will start coding, the engineers will start designing and then our shared language is code."
• With AI tools, the barrier between thinking and building disappears

On the design process with AI:

• "You start not by getting everything perfect. You actually start by building."
• "You get this clump of thing. It might not be great. It might not be perfect, but it is the thing and you sculpt it."
• Like sculpting vs painting - you start with something real and shape it, rather than painting pixels that aren't real

On systems thinking:

• Design in a "systems first way" - decompose problems into primitives that can combine flexibly
• Example: Notion's blocks, pages, databases - simple primitives that create emergence
• "You try to keep that core concepts as simple as possible, but they all are somewhat flexible"

On what won't change:

• Focus on the core concepts that will stay constant over 10 years
• Everything else can evolve around those fundamentals

On what designers should focus on:

• Deep craft and details (AI can't do this yet)
• Systems thinking - understanding how everything connects
• "The more domain knowledge you have plus the agent, the more things you can do"