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The Interview Loop, Mapped1 / 2

1 min lesson

The technical phone screens

Work through the cases in "The technical phone screens", pairing each signal with the move that fits.

Step 1 of 2

There are usually two technical screens, one medium-hard problem each, tilted toward applied-AI systems or editor primitives. You're allowed to use GPT and Cursor. That permission is the test: you're being watched for how you drive the tool, not whether you memorized an algorithm.

Use this stage map to decide what evidence belongs in each round. Memorizing the order is the shallow version. For every stage, prepare one artifact, one story and one question that shows how you reason in the role.

These aren't LeetCode-style puzzle screens. The problems look like the actual job - building against models and code.

Streaming LLM output

Consume a token stream, handle partial chunks

Backpressure, cancellation and a clean render

Syntax-aware edit op

Apply an edit that respects structure, not raw text

Don't corrupt the file when input is messy

File-tree diff

Compare two trees, emit added/removed/changed

Handle renames and nesting cleanly

Small RAG / agent loop

Retrieve context, call a tool, iterate

Decide when to stop; handle a bad tool result