1 min lesson
Score every run honestly
Give a plain answer to "Why does Cursor add jitter to exponential backoff and what failure does it prevent?" Then ground it in one lesson detail.
Step 1 of 2
Score every run honestlySelf-rubric
- Correctness
- Does it pass the edge cases you'd test in code review - empty input, concurrent access, the refill-while-empty case? Run your own adversarial tests, don't eyeball it.
- Communication
- Did you state the approach and complexity before coding and flag trade-offs as you went? An interviewer hires the narration as much as the diff.
- Unaided fundamentals
- Be brutal: would this pass a senior bar with no AI? If you stalled on the linked-list pointers or the off-by-one in the window, that's the gap to drill.
Two runs scoring 4+ across all three means you've cleared the screen condition. Until then, keep repping.
The manager-specific trap is rust disguised as rust-removal. You'll be tempted to read solutions instead of writing them, because reading feels productive and typing feels slow. Reading is not the skill being tested. Close the tab, start the timer and produce a working file from a blank editor - that's the only rep that counts.
When you finish early, don't go quiet. Volunteer the complexity, name one thing you'd change for production scale and propose a test you didn't have time to write. For an EM candidate this signals the instinct you'll bring to code review, which is exactly the judgment the screen is probing under the no-AI rule.