1 min lesson
Log every override of the agent
Use "Keep a running note of every place you rejected or rewrote what the agent produced" to say what you would do next.
Step 1 of 3
Log every override of the agentYour judgment is the grade
Cursor expects you to use AI heavily in the room and grades your judgment over the output, so the override log is the most valuable thing you'll bring. Keep a running note of every place you rejected or rewrote what the agent produced.
Learn more
Advanced table
Each row is a moment you can narrate in the presentation
- What the agent did
- Suggested a polling loop to watch for new issues
- What you did instead
- Switched to a webhook the SDK already supports
- Why
- Polling is the obvious answer that a reviewer would catch; the webhook is correct
- What the agent did
- Wrote a README that described the tool in marketing voice
- What you did instead
- Rewrote the quickstart to a copy-paste-able 3-command path
- Why
- A developer wants to run it, not read about it
- What the agent did
- Invented an SDK method that sounded right
- What you did instead
- Checked the SDK source, found the real method, fixed the call
- Why
- Publishing a hallucinated API is the cardinal DX sin
| What the agent did | What you did instead | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Suggested a polling loop to watch for new issues | Switched to a webhook the SDK already supports | Polling is the obvious answer that a reviewer would catch; the webhook is correct |
| Wrote a README that described the tool in marketing voice | Rewrote the quickstart to a copy-paste-able 3-command path | A developer wants to run it, not read about it |
| Invented an SDK method that sounded right | Checked the SDK source, found the real method, fixed the call | Publishing a hallucinated API is the cardinal DX sin |
Each row is a moment you can narrate in the presentation.
Ship the override log as a short "decisions" section in your README. Cursor's reviewers are power users who can see when AI ran unsupervised and a candidate who can name where they overruled the agent reads as the engineer they want: fast with the tool, faster to distrust it. The log turns your AI usage from a liability into the evidence.
The deliverable bar is "would this actually land on X or HN and teach a real developer something," not "did I complete the assignment." A scope that's technically finished but boring fails that bar. If your honest answer to "would I post this?" is no, you scoped the wrong thing and the fix is a smaller build with a sharper whoa moment, not a bigger one with none.
Learn more
Optional practice
Practice: Log every override of the agent
QYou're scoping the mock work-trial and have two ideas: a broad SDK wrapper that touches Agent, CLI and MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. but barely works or a tiny MCP server that does one surprising thing flawlessly. Which fits Cursor's deliverable bar and why?