1 min lesson
What the company is, plainly
Recall the main items in "What the company is, plainly", then connect each one to the work.
Step 1 of 2
What the company is, plainly
Cursor (Anysphere) is flat, small, talent-dense, truth-seeking and high-intensity, with stretches that can run six-day weeks. The paid build onsite - eight to nine hours inside a real slice of the Cursor codebase with a live Slack channel - is a deliberate preview of that pace. Self-assess against it honestly.
Don't paper over the intensity in the values round. "I'm fine with anything" reads as untruthful in a truth-seeking culture. A grounded answer names a past stretch you owned under real pressure, what it cost you and why you'd still choose it. Self-aware beats eager.
- You get little hand-holding; ambiguity is the default, not the exception.
- You're expected to use GPT and Cursor heavily during technical rounds - but judgment in driving them is what's graded.
- The reward is impact: a pattern you build for one customer can ship to the product millions of developers use.
When asked "why Cursor?", give a specific, non-generic reason tied to this role. Something like: the FDE seat is where customer delivery and product meet, so a refactor pattern you prove at one company becomes impact across the whole user base. Generic mission-love is a flag; concrete reasons that show you understand the loop are the signal.