3 min lesson
Pillar 1 - Cost-attribution programs
Make the call in this situation: "A leader asks you to build a cost-attribution program for inference spend and wants teams held accountable for what they use. What's the strongest sequencing and why?" Explain what supports it.
Step 1 of 3
Attribution is the foundation pillar. Until spend can be traced to a product, a feature or a user, no one can decide whether it is worth it - and at Cursor's scale, ungoverned inference spend lands in a shared pool with no owner.
The work is a pipeline: instrument the spend, tag it to something meaningful, convert it to a unit metric, then publish a picture leadership trusts. Each step has a real failure mode if you skip it.
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
Each step has a failure mode if you skip it; the final publish step is where leadership trust is won or lost.