1 min lesson
Show one true 90→100 story
Describe what "Truth-seeking is a named Cursor value and this stage tests it directly" changes in practice.
Step 1 of 2
Show one true 90→100 story
Pick the most unglamorous detail you ever sweated and tell it proudly: the focus ring that had to survive keyboard and pointer entry, the empty state nobody asked for, the one-frame jank you chased through a profiler. The work most engineers skip is exactly the work Cursor is hiring this seat to do.
Truth-seeking is a named Cursor value and this stage tests it directly. Volunteer a trade-off you regret or something you would rebuild. Saying “I shipped this card stack with a CSS-only approach and it was the wrong call - it broke on focus order and I would reach for a headless primitive now” reads as confidence, not weakness. Pretending a piece is flawless reads as someone who cannot see their own bad ideas, which is the one thing they explicitly screen for.
“The constraint was that this panel could be dismissed while it was still animating in. An ease-out looked fine on the happy path but snapped if you interrupted it. I moved to a spring so it could reverse from any point in flight, tuned the damping until the reverse felt deliberate rather than springy and capped the duration so a fast user never waited on it.”