2 min lesson
The passion test
For each case in "The passion test", name the signal and the response you would use.
Step 1 of 2
The whole hiring process at Cursor is engineered to surface passion and the paid 2-day in-person trial is the bluntest instrument for it. You ship a real project, eat meals with the team and present your work. The premise is simple and a little ruthless.
Michael Truell's logic for the trial is that you are probably not going to be super willing to do that if you are maybe just viewing it as a job. The two days are designed to reveal whether building this is something you would do anyway.
You cannot perform passion for two days. So the question for a Design Engineer is how to show it in a way that survives sustained contact with the team. Three sources of evidence carry the weight.
Use Cursor daily on a codebase you care about and form specific opinions about its UI.
Name one interaction you would redesign and exactly how, like the diff-accept affordance or the agent status surface.
Point to side projects and things you polished for no external reason at all.
The 90-to-100 instinct showing up in your own work, unpaid, is the cleanest passion signal there is.
Connect why you are here to building better tools for professional programmers.
Make it personal: a moment a tool failed you and the kind of tool you wish had existed.