1 min lesson
Study the actual product before any interview
Tell someone how to act on this idea: "Install Cursor and use it as your editor for a week before the loop."
Step 1 of 2
Performance is a UI responsibility here, not something handed to an infra team. A 60fps interaction and low perceived latency are how the product earns the word magical. Inside an editor, that means animating compositor-only properties, avoiding layout thrash, virtualizing long lists and making slow operations feel fast with optimistic UI and the right loading affordance.
Install Cursor and use it as your editor for a week before the loop. Form specific opinions: which interaction feels great, which one you'd change, where a transition is missing, where density is off. Generic praise (“it's so fast”) is worthless in the room. “The inline-diff accept affordance is great, but the hover target is a few pixels too small and the enter-animation has no easing - here's how I'd tune it” is the signal they're hiring for.
Walk in with one concrete UI critique and one concrete improvement for a real Cursor surface, ready to sketch or describe. It demonstrates the exact skill the role exists for - taste plus the engineering to act on it - and it shows you treated the interview like the job: you actually shipped some thinking before you arrived.