Lee Robinson, currently at Cursor and formerly VP of Product at Vercel. Robinson is a prominent figure in the web development community, known for his thoughts on developer experience, AI, and building successful products. His principles are gathered from his personal blog, interviews, and public statements.
On Building Products and Startups
- On the velocity of AI-native teams: "AI-native teams will move 10x faster than those not willing to change." [1]
- The priority of shipping: "Shipping fast beats the best strategy." [1]
- A bias toward action: "Create a bias toward shipping." [1]
- The efficiency of small teams: "Small teams ship faster." [1]
- Product adoption over mere deployment: "Landings > launches (i.e. product adoption > shipping code)." [1]
- The iterative cycle of product development: "Listen, build, ship, tell the customer, then repeat forever." [1]
- The essence of a great developer product: "The first thing and the most important thing that makes a great developer experience is the actual product of the tool has to be incredible." [2]
- A simple formula for success: "Talk to them, build relationships with developers... go back and fix the things that they're frustrated with as fast as possible." [2]
- The battle is won in the details: "The battle is won in the trenches of every single day iterating and iterating on how you make the experience better." [2]
- On hiring: "There are two hiring answers: hell yes or no." [1]
- Valuing potential: "Growth potential > current skill." [1]
- Hiring people you can learn from: "Hire people you can learn from." [1]
- A forward-thinking hiring approach: "Hire people you would someday be happy working for." [1]
- A favorite interview question: "What work are you most proud of?" [1]
On Developer Experience (DX)
- The critical role of documentation: "Docs make or break developer products." [3]
- The audience for documentation: "Your goal is write content beginners can understand and experts appreciate." [3]
- Documentation as a product: "Great docs are a product themselves. They need constant updates and polish." [3]
- The importance of code examples: "Ensure docs have many code examples you can copy/paste or run." [3]
- Clarity and conciseness in writing: "With writing, be both precise and concise – avoid technical jargon and idioms." [3]
- Progressive disclosure of complexity: "Keep the first-time experience simple and slowly reveal complexity." [3]
- The value of community: "Building community is a long-term investment. It must be in your company DNA." [3]
- Community is a two-way street: "It's not a collection of developers you are trying to sell your product to. It's an exchange. They share bugs, you fix them." [3]
- Making developers feel heard: "A community forms around a product when developers feel heard." [3]
- Meet developers where they are: "You must meet developers where they already are: GitHub, X, Reddit, Slack, or at meetups." [3]
- Framework-defined infrastructure: "We have a philosophy that we call framework defined infrastructure." [4] This philosophy aims to reduce the need for developers to write an intermediate layer of infrastructure as code. [4]
On Artificial Intelligence
- AI is changing software development: "Like many of you, I'm finding that AI is changing how I build software. It started out as a fancy autocomplete, but has since become a core part of my coding workflow." [5]
- The archaic nature of past methods: "The way I wrote software 10 years ago feels archaic." [5]
- The new reality of coding: "You mean I can just ask an agent to code the feature and it will work!? Wild times." [5]
- The gap in AI education: "There is a massive gap in AI education. More people are becoming developers because of AI, but they're not learning the right skills to actually succeed." [5]
- The importance of mental models: Beginners often "don't understand determinism vs. non-determinism. When they don't get good answers one day, they think the tools are broken. Wrong. They are missing the correct mental model." [5]
- Understanding the fundamentals of AI: He has expressed a desire to create more content explaining the fundamentals of AI models and how to use them effectively. [5]
- AI models are probabilistic, not deterministic: "Most AI models¹ are not this way — they are probabilistic. Developers don't have to explicitly program the instructions." [6]
- Neural networks as the foundation: "AI models are built on neural networks — think of them as a giant web of decision-making pathways that learn from examples." [6]
On Career and Personal Growth
- There are no limits to your career: "You have no career ceiling." [1]
- Grit over innate talent: "Grit > talent." [1]
- The power of consistent effort: "There's no substitute for putting in the hours." [1]
- The principle of continuous improvement: "Get 1% better every day." [1]
- The pursuit of truth: "Be ruthlessly truth seeking." [1]
- Embracing being wrong: "You can just change your mind if wrong." [1]
- Holding strong, but flexible opinions: "Have strong opinions, loosely held." [1]
- Maximizing learning opportunities: "Maximize your exposure hours." [1]
- Valuing anecdotal evidence: "'Anecdata' > data." [1]
- Seeking collective wisdom: "Seek the collective truth, not just one opinion." [1]
On Communication and Leadership
- Communication as a core competency: "Communication is the job." [1]
- Clarity in writing reflects clarity in thought: "Clear writing is clear thinking." [1]
- Everyone needs to be a better writer: "Everyone (yes, you) needs to become a better writer." [1]
- Leadership provides clarity: "Leaders step up to provide clarity when absent." [1]
- The power of influence: "Influence > titles." [1]
- Leaders are doers: "Leaders have to do the work themselves and delegate." [1]
- Authenticity in marketing: "Education is the best form of developer marketing. Be authentic and own your failures." [1][3]
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