Craft and quality beat speed and scale, with or without agents
Ryan welcomes Tom Moor, head of engineering at Linear, to discuss AI agents’ mixed results for productivity in the development lifecycle, the importance of context for maximizing agents’ effectiveness, and the role that junior developers need to take in a world increasingly driven by AI.
Episode notes:
Linear is a tool for planning and building products that streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.
Connect with Tom on Twitter.
This episode’s shoutout goes to user ozz, who won a Populist badge for their answer to Column width not working in DataTables bootstrap.
TRANSCRIPT
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Why Linear Built an API For Agents
Cursor, the AI code editor, recently integrated with Linear, a project management tool, enabling developers to assign tasks directly to Cursor's background coding agent within Linear. The collaboration felt natural, as Cursor already used Linear internally. Linear's new agent-specific API played a key role in enabling this integration, providing agents like Cursor with context-aware sessions to interact efficiently with the platform.
Developers can now offload tasks such as fixing issues, updating documentation, or managing dependencies to the Cursor agent. However, both Linear’s Tom Moor and Cursor’s Andrew Milich emphasized the importance of giving agents clear, thoughtful input. Simply assigning vague tasks like “@cursor, fix this” isn’t effective—developers still need to guide the agent with relevant context, such as links to similar pull requests.
Milich and Moor also discussed the growing value and adoption of autonomous agents, and hinted at a future where more companies build agent-specific APIs to support these tools. The full interview is available via podcast or YouTube.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest in AI and development in Cursor AI and Linear:
Install Cursor and Learn Programming With AI Help
Using Cursor AI as Part of Your Development Workflow
Anti-Agile Project Tracker Linear the Latest to Take on Jira
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