Modal can now be triggered directly from an Airflow DAG, letting teams run GPU-backed AI/ML tasks without setting up Celery or Kubernetes executors. The guide covers installing Modal in an Airflow environment, setting MODAL_TOKEN_ID and MODAL_TOKEN_SECRET, and two approaches: calling deployed Modal Functions via lookup, or building a custom operator that runs Python in Modal Sandboxes. A Modal Airflow provider package is in progress.
Cursor published a follow-up to its original "Problems" post, listing the research questions it considers most critical for the next phase of AI coding. The company has extended Copilot++ to predict the next cursor position, and combining that with next-edit prediction lets the model "play" sequences of low-entropy changes—a demo required 11 Tab presses versus 3 presses of every other key, which Cursor calls Cursor Flow. Other directions include action prediction across the codebase, perfect edits via more inference-time compute, hallucinated pseudocode, multi-file editing, optimal context, multi-hop context, and bug detection and debugging.
Hunch, a spatial canvas that combines models such as OpenAI GPT-4o, Anthropic Claude 3 Opus and Stable Diffusion 3, uses Modal Sandboxes to execute AI-generated code safely in isolated, ephemeral containers. The integration required only a few lines of Python and supports pip installs, attached storage volumes and automatic scaling. Hunch said the setup lets non-coders build workflows that fetch API data or send results to Slack webhooks.
Cursor published a list of problems it is working on, including training a custom fast reranker that filters 500k tokens from all sources down to the most relevant 8k per request. The list also covers an edit-oriented copilot, constrained in-flow agents for large codebases, bug finding, and larger-scale edits. As of Oct 12, 2023, Cursor had indexed 1.4B vectors and 150k codebases.
Cursor researcher Arvid Lunnemark argues that prompting should be called "prompt design" and compared to web design, since both pursue clear communication with dynamic inputs and must fit content to different "sizes" — screen sizes for the web, context windows for prompts. He released Priompt v0.1, a React-like JSX-based prompt design library already used inside Cursor, with a preview site for rendering prompts against real request data.