A human figure casting a shadow shaped like a lightbulb and code — learning as the output

The Learning Is the Collateral

Farhan Thawar, head of engineering at Shopify, gave an excellent talk at the recent Cursor Compile event. A few things in particular stuck with me. The first takeaway was “the learning is the collateral, not the code.” He told a story about 50 engineers who spent 18 months building something and were ready to launch. The day before launch, Tobi — Shopify’s founder — asks one question: “If you could start over, how would you build it?” ...

July 2, 2026 · 2 min · Ben Karciauskas
A circular agent loop with terminal, checkmark, code, and gear icons on a dark navy background

Prompting is dead. It's all about loops.

Prompting is the new COBOL. Still technically works. Still widely practiced. Ancient. Boris Cherny — the guy who built Claude Code — said it straight: “I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops that are running. They’re the ones prompting Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.” Peter Steinberger said the same thing. 2.2 million people saw it. The point isn’t subtle: the work has moved up a level. You don’t write the code anymore. You write the system that writes the code. ...

June 19, 2026 · 4 min · Ben Karciauskas

Jupyter Notebooks in Cursor: The Fast Lane for Iterative Coding and Learning

Discover seamless code exploration—and what to expect—when using Jupyter workflows inside Cursor When I first stumbled upon Jupyter Notebook support in Cursor, it was hard to get genuinely excited—my early attempts were honestly pretty clunky. Editing .ipynb files felt unreliable, and the workflow didn’t quite “click” the way a true notebook should. I kept bouncing between clumsy interfaces, and it didn’t feel worth the hassle. But recently, something changed. I’m not sure exactly when the update landed, but suddenly, working in notebooks inside Cursor is not just possible, but actually a pleasure. ...

October 30, 2025 · 3 min · Ben Karciauskas
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