David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

From Dev Propulsion Labs by Evil Martians

February 10, 2026 · 50 min · Season 4 · Episode 11

About this episode

David Gomes discusses the adoption of AI in coding and the dynamics of engineering teams.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Victoria Melnikova

Guest: David Gomes

Topics covered

  • AI adoption
  • developer tools
  • engineering teams
  • coding skills
  • business strategy
  • team diversity

Keywords

  • AI coding
  • developer resistance
  • engineering styles
  • team performance
  • startup culture

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cursor, Evil Martians, Neon, Databricks

Products: Chroma

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