1 min lesson
Mini paid-onsite simulation
Put this idea into your own words: "The onsite grades the build and the defense."
Step 1 of 2
The real decision round is a paid 8–9 hour build inside a slice of the Cursor codebase, with a live Slack channel and a deliberately vague brief. You can't replicate the paycheck or the exact repo. You can replicate the shape of it.
Clone an OSS project you've never touched. Hand yourself a fuzzy feature brief and a 2–3 hour box. The constraint that matters: unfamiliar code, ambiguous ask, hard clock. That's the simulation.
Both halves are scored
The onsite grades the build and the defense. A clean feature presented as a shrug loses to a scrappier feature presented with sharp reasoning about tradeoffs and evals. Rehearse the presentation as seriously as the code.