1 min lesson
Earning credibility fast
Talk this through in your own words: "A customer's lead engineer opens with 'we need Cursor to auto-generate our unit tests.' What do you do before agreeing to build it?" Finish with the next move.
Step 1 of 2
Earning credibility fast
Senior engineers gate-keep their codebase. They've watched consultants parachute in with confident nonsense and they'll test you in the first ten minutes. You earn the right to ask hard questions by demonstrating you already understand their world.
- Admit the limits of an AI agent honestly and early. Over-promising on the first call is how you lose the room for the rest of the engagement.
- Show, don't claim. One small, correct edit live in their editor beats a deck about capability.
- Make the repo-read and their vocabulary concrete: "I saw your migrations run through a custom script, not the framework's," and say "flaky test quarantine," not "quality enablement."
When the decomposition prompt lands, spend your first two minutes asking, not answering. Narrate it: "I want to diagnose before I prescribe, so let me ask a few things first." Then run the bottleneck questions out loud. Interviewers grade the questions you ask at least as heavily as the design you eventually give.