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Reconstruct the enterprise SDLC1 / 2

2 min lesson

The thesis

Write the one discovery question that gets a prospect past their methodology, then name the four things it must surface. Why does that beat accepting the stated process?

Step 1 of 2

The thesis

There are two streams, forward and return; the next section splits them.

This is what separates a real field engineer from a feature-lister in an interview. A weak candidate pitches into a vacuum. A strong one says: show me your value streamThe end-to-end path a change takes from idea to running in production. Press Enter for the full definition. and I'll show you where the AI removes toil without touching your risk posture. That line only lands if you can reconstruct the value stream faster than the customer can.

Say it like this

"Tell me how a single feature actually ships, from the moment someone has the idea to the moment a customer touches it. Skip the methodology. Give me the queues and the sign-offs."

Cursor is a control plane over the whole stream, not 'an IDE'

Reset the feature-lister frame before you walk in. Cursor now ships as an end-to-end SDLC control plane, with a surface touching every stage of the stream you just reconstructed. Naming the surfaces per stage is how you avoid sounding like you're selling autocomplete.

There's a generational arc behind this. Era 1 was Tab/autocomplete, with attention on keystrokes. Era 2 was synchronous agents riding shotgun, with attention on steering, and it lasted under a year. Era 3 is async agents running in the cloud and returning artifacts, with attention on reviewing and managing. Locate where the customer's org sits on that arc and you've framed the whole pitch.

Cursor surfaces across the SDLC

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: cursor-surfaces-sdlc

The same forward stage ribbon as the lifecycle, with each surface named where it lands: the desktop IDE and the Agents Window at Build, cloud agents across Build → Test, Bugbot in human review, the CLI piping into CI at Test/Release, and automations plus the SDK in Operate and the return loop.

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Optional practice

Test yourself on The thesis

QA prospect's pain is pull requests that sit for days waiting on a human reviewer. Which Cursor surface lands at that stage of the SDLC?