scoping

Rehearse a 40-minute build with time reserved for testing. Choose a small user task, make it work and explain the failures you found before proposing a launch.

A worked live-round walkthrough. The trap is building a pretty summariser. The scoring path is a narrow extractor with structured output, a small test set that probes the hard cases, and an honest readout.

Vague prompts are deliberate. The first five minutes show whether you can turn ambiguity into a buildable, testable scope, and the interviewer is watching that more than the code that follows.

Things break in live rounds, and interviewers often learn more from how you recover than from a smooth build. The answer is calm narration, a time box, simplification and a fallback that still shows judgment.

Agent prompts tempt candidates into ambitious builds that collapse. The strong answer builds the least autonomous version that demonstrates the idea, with mocked tools, clear limits and tests of the hard paths.