2 min lesson
Stage 1 - the screen
Rebuild the parts of "Stage 1 - the screen", then say why each one matters.
Step 1 of 2
The first call is short and conversational and easy to underestimate. It sorts for a specific, evidenced reason you want this role at this company, plus an honest read on whether the pace is one you actually want. Generic AI enthusiasm fails here faster than anywhere else in the loop.
- Why Cursor, why now
- A crisp, evidenced reason tied to coding agents and this product - not the category.
- Your body of work
- They will look at it. For a DX role it is part of the screen, not a footnote.
- The pace
- Cursor's intensity, possibly a six-day-week culture, is discussed openly here.
- Specificity of love
- Genuine, concrete enthusiasm for coding agents - not surface-level AI hype.
Lead with the product and what's newly possible, not the trend. “I love AI” is the answer everyone gives and it reads as low signal. Name an actual coding-agent workflow you've pushed on and what you learned.
“I've been wiring Cursor's 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. into my own release workflow - a background agent that drafts the changelog narrative from merged PRs and I rewrote its .cursor/rules three times before the tone stopped sounding like a robot. That loop, finding where the agent breaks and teaching it to do better, is the actual job here. I want to do it in public, for other developers, on the product I already abuse daily.”