Cursteroids
A recruiting microsite where the job description is a playable Asteroids-style game. Every mechanic teaches part of the AI Adoption Engineer role at Cursor.
By Michael Lynn • 7/20/2026
Cursteroids
Job descriptions are where curiosity goes to die. Cursteroids is an experiment in doing the opposite: take a real role — AI Adoption Engineer at Cursor — and make it playable, so that ninety seconds with the arrow keys tells you more about the work than three paragraphs of bullet points would.
The idea
The role is about turning AI pilots into permanent practice inside enterprise engineering teams. So the game's mechanics are the job:
- The asteroids are adoption blockers pulled from real engagements: low trust in AI, docs drift, unclear ROI, flaky CI.
- A dotted suggestion line tracks the best target, and you press Tab to accept it — firing feels like accepting a completion.
- Your health bar is Trust. Collisions burn it, and so does overclaiming (a long streak of missed shots). Converting a skeptic restores it.
- Some blockers can't be shot at all. "Low trust in AI" only converts if you fly alongside it and pair with it. You build with the team, not in front of them.
- Cloud Agent pickups bank charges you can deploy on the chore blockers while you handle the judgment calls yourself.
- Rules pickups permanently weaken a blocker type for the rest of the run, because a good rules library outlives the session that produced it.
What happens after a run
Every finished run produces a shareable permalink with a builder identity — Trust Guardian, Workflow Diagnoser, Systems Operator — rendered as an Open Graph card that unfurls in feeds. The whole result is bit-packed into an eleven-character code in the URL, so there's no database and nothing stored.
The game is deliberately not the hiring filter. The real filter is an artifact challenge: fork the repo and ship one adoption artifact a real team could own. The repo's own
.cursorrules file is written as a model of what that leave-behind looks like.Build notes
Canvas game loop with the engine owning all state and React reading a snapshot at ~7Hz. Touch controls with a virtual joystick for mobile. The site runs as a Next.js multi-zone under
/cursteroids on this domain, deployed separately so the game and this site never share a dependency tree.There are a few things hidden in it for the curious — the browser console is a reasonable place to start.