1 min lesson
Quantify it
Connect "Four services, four contracts. Auth hands the agent backend a validated identity" to the decision you would make.
Step 1 of 2
Quantify itnumbers make the design real
Reach for order-of-magnitude figures and the levers behind them, framed as your targets rather than Cursor's published numbers.
"Four services, four contracts. Auth hands the agent backend a validated identity; the agent backend calls SCM through a provider-neutral seam; on completion it hands a typed event to the webhook service, which owns at-least-once delivery and a DLQ. Every hop has a contained failure mode and a trace span on one run id. If GitHub is down, only the SCM step degrades; if the webhook receiver is down, the run still completes and delivery retries."
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Full explanation
The management angle
The management anglewhere most engineers stop and you shouldn't
This is an EM loop, so end on people, not boxes. How would you staff, sequence and de-risk building this with a small, high-talent-density team in a flat org?
- Sequence by risk: harden auth and the durable state spine first, since everything else depends on them.
- Ship a thin vertical slice end-to-end early - one provider, one agent step, one webhook - then deepen, so integration risk surfaces in week two not month three.
- Staff to ownership, not layers: a small team where engineers own a domain end to end fits Cursor's "no narrow job descriptions" culture better than a handoff chain.
- De-risk with contract tests and a staging game-day before the first real load and stay hands-on in the reviews yourself - this is a player-coach role.
Close the design by switching hats out loud: "As the EM, I'd sequence auth and durable state first, ship a thin end-to-end slice to flush integration risk and keep myself in code review on the contract boundaries." That one move shows you're the player-coach the JD describes, not a manager who only draws boxes - which is exactly the bar the founder round is checking.