2 min lesson
Use AI in the practical round, visibly and competently
Answer this as if it were happening now. "An interviewer asks how you use AI in your IT work. Which answer best signals you're genuinely AI-native?" Say what supports your choice.
Step 1 of 2
Use AI in the practical round, visibly and competently
Cursor publishes no interview stages for this role, so don't plan around a specific format. If any round puts you at a machine with a real problem, fluent Cursor use is part of what's evaluated, not a shortcut to hide.
- Narrate your prompting: say what you're asking the agent to do and why, so they can see the judgment behind each prompt.
- Review what it generates out loud: catch the bug, tighten the auth. The review is the senior signal.
- Don't perform AI use. If a two-line edit is faster by hand, do it by hand; reaching for the agent on everything reads as a crutch.
"I use ChatGPT sometimes" is the answer that sinks candidates. It's vague, it's not Cursor and it signals AI is something you reach for only occasionally. Replace it with one specific, recent thing you shipped with AI and exactly where you kept control.
"I run most of my automation work in Cursor now. Two weeks ago I had it scaffold a SCIMSystem for Cross-domain Identity Management. A standard for automatically creating and removing user accounts when people join or leave. Press Enter for the full definition. reconciliation job against our Okta tenant. It got the pagination and the diff logic mostly right on the first pass. I rewrote the conflict-resolution rules myself, because that's the part where a wrong call silently deprovisions someone, and I added a dry-run flag before I'd let it touch the real tenant."