2 min lesson
Use AI in the practical round - visibly and competently
Take this situation: "An interviewer asks how you use AI in your IT work. Which answer best signals you're genuinely AI-native?" Lead with your decision, then add the reason.
Step 1 of 2
Use AI in the practical round - visibly and competently
Cursor's practical round leans toward real, hands-on building, often a paid work-trial day rather than abstract whiteboarding. If you're given a machine and a problem, using Cursor fluently is part of the evaluation, not a shortcut you should hide.
- Narrate your prompting: say what you're asking the agent to do and why, so they see your judgment, not just your typing.
- Review what it generates out loud - catch the bug, tighten the auth, question the assumption. 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 occasionally rather than a tool you've integrated into how you build. 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.”