The product surface, end to end

A DX Engineer is the person developers expect to know every corner of the product cold. If a candidate fumbles the difference between ComposerCursor's own fast coding model, tuned for the editor and priced well below frontier models; the recommended day-to-day model for executing a plan. Press Enter for the full definition. and a Cloud Agent, the room concludes they don't actually live in the tool they'd be paid to teach.

Your job is to teach what developers can build with Cursor's API, SDK, Plugins, Automations, CLI and coding agents. You cannot teach a surface you can't place. Before any interview, you should be able to draw the whole map from memory and say, for any teaching scenario, which surface you'd reach for and why.

Group the surface into three layers. The editor is where most developers meet Cursor (Agent modeCursor's full-capability mode: the AI can read the codebase, write and edit files, move them and run terminal commands. Contrast with Ask mode, which is read-only. Press Enter for the full definition., ComposerCursor's own fast coding model, tuned for the editor and priced well below frontier models; the recommended day-to-day model for executing a plan. Press Enter for the full definition., Tab), the headless layer is where it runs without a human watching (the CLI agent and Cloud AgentsAgents that run in a Cursor-managed virtual machine, check out the repo, do the work and open a pull request, then shut down, with no load on your laptop. Press Enter for the full definition.) and the programmable layer is where you call the same harness from your own code (the Agent SDKA programmatic interface for running Cursor agents from your own scripts, services or CI, locally or in the cloud. Press Enter for the full definition.).

Compile 2026 adds three adjacent surfaces a DX Engineer should be able to place without overclaiming: Origin as source hosting and review infrastructure, larger from-scratch model training as roadmap context and Cursor Mobile as away-from-desk agent supervision. They do not replace the core three-layer product map; they explain where the map is expanding.