To get hired at Cursor, an AI coding assistant built by Anysphere, you can’t use AI in your interview.
“We actually still interview people without allowing them to use AI, other than autocomplete, for first technical screens,” said Michael Truell, the cofounder and CEO of Anysphere, on an episode of Y Combinator’s podcast published Wednesday.
“Programming without AI is still a really great time-boxed test for skill and intelligence,” Truell said, adding that those are core qualities he looks for in a teammate.
There’s another reason behind the rule: fairness.
“We’ve hired lots of people who are fantastic programmers who actually have no experience with AI tools,” Truell said. “We would much rather hire those people and then teach them on the job.”
That beginner’s mindset can be a product advantage, offering fresh insights from first-time users, he added.
The final step of Cursor’s hiring process isn’t a traditional interview. Shortlisted candidates are invited to the company’s office for two days. They work on a real project alongside the team, join in for meals, and demo what they’ve built at the end.
Truell said this setup helps them spot people who are genuinely passionate about the “problem space” — not just shopping around for a job.
“You’re probably not going to be super willing to do that if you’re maybe just viewing it as a job and you’re applying to a bunch of technology companies at the same time,” he added.
Cursor also looks for engineers who are eager to experiment. Truell said the company encourages carving out time for “bottom-up experimentation” — sometimes even sectioning off teams to build independently.
Truell said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published in May that early hiring at Anysphere was slower than it should have been. The goal was to build a world-class group of engineers and researchers — “a certain mix of intellectual curiosity and experimentation,” he said.
Anysphere, Cursor’s parent company, raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation last month, the company said last week.
Business Insider’s Eugene Kim reported earlier this month that Amazon is in talks with Cursor to adopt the AI coding tool internally.
Cursor did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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AI ban for job applications
Anysphere isn’t the only AI company banning the use of AI in job applications.
Business Insider’s Alistair Barr reported last month that leading AI startup Anthropic will not let candidates use AI when applying for jobs.
“We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills,”Anthropic wrote in a job posting for an economist.
The requirement was listed across multiple roles, including technical ones like machine learning systems engineer.
About a week later, the company behind Claude backtracked on this policy.
“We’re having to evolve, even as the company at the forefront of a lot of this technology, around how we evaluate candidates,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, said during an interview on CNBC in May. “So our future interview loops will have much more of this ability to co-use AI.”
