Coding Drills & Take-Home Exercises
Six worked coding drills (retries, similarity, RRF, dispatcher, chunker, rate limiter) and how take-homes are judged.
Q1What do reviewers look for first in a take-home AI project?show answer
In plain words: Clear notes about your choices. Tests. A small quality check with numbers. Safe handling of secrets. And honesty about what is missing.
Full answer · A README that states requirements, assumptions and trade-offs; clean structure; tests (especially for validation, authorization and failure paths); evidence of evaluation (even a small labelled set with numbers); sensible handling of secrets and errors; and honesty about what you'd do with more time. A modest system with rigor beats an ambitious demo with no tests.
Q2How should you use AI tools during a live coding interview?show answer
In plain words: Follow the interviewer's rules. If allowed, say what you use, check it and own the design. Be able to explain every line.
Full answer · Follow the interviewer's rules; if tools are allowed, say what you're doing and why, verify everything, and keep ownership of design decisions and tests. If they aren't allowed, don't use them. In either case you should be able to explain every line you submit and its failure modes.
Q3You have 60 minutes and the task is 'build a RAG Q&A over these docs'. How do you spend it?show answer
In plain words: Plan for a few minutes. Build the simplest version that works from start to end. Add checks and tests. Finish with a short write-up.
Full answer · Ten minutes clarifying and designing (interfaces, tenant/ACL, evaluation approach); twenty building the thinnest end-to-end path (ingest, chunk with metadata, hybrid or vector retrieval, grounded answer with citations); ten on validation and failure handling; ten writing a small labelled eval and tests; and ten on the README stating limits and next steps. Finish end to end before polishing any part.