AI coding: It's the rule parser problem from the forum. I used the Opus model and kept talking with the interviewer the whole way through. Honestly, in the moment I couldn't fully understand what the AI wrote either (a lot of the time I have to read Claude's code over and over before I get it, I'm just not that good), but I got the feeling the interviewer was also only half following and just nodding along the whole time. At the end he said he trusted Opus could handle the requirements well, so there was no need to keep writing.
Integration: The original reconciliation problem from the forum. The day before the interview I had practiced it end to end, but in the actual interview the interviewer added some extra requirements on the spot, and then some small bugs in my own code meant I only finished part 2 with 10 minutes left, and the interviewer didn't let me go any further. I could tell he wasn't very satisfied.
Debug: The original Requests problem, also one I had practiced. But when it came to actually doing it, the debugger in my local VS Code just would not run properly no matter what. I spent 15 minutes trying to track down the environment issue with no luck, and it was the first time the interviewer had run into this too. In the end I had to grit my teeth and look for the cause from memory, but without a debugger it's really not realistic to find the root cause of this one, and I couldn't just pull the answer out of thin air for him. The interviewer said he would note down what happened, but in the end it turned out this was the round that sank me. Afterwards I found the root cause myself: it was a package conflict, and Gemini fixed it in 5 minutes.
Behaviors & goals: Standard questions, but there was one I hadn't prepared well: have you ever had a situation at work where you first built an MVP and then had to keep improving it? This round was neither good nor bad.
A week later I got a call from the recruiter saying my overall performance was positive, but there was still a gap from the team's expectations. Mainly debug and integration didn't meet the bar, but they were still relatively happy with me and hoped I would reapply early next year (the usual cooldown is 1 year). My own read is that if I had passed debug or done integration perfectly, I would still have had a shot, but the fact is I just had bad luck. I put a lot of energy into preparing for this company's interviews and was confident I'd pass, and in the end I still failed, which hit me pretty hard. Writing this up is a kind of closure for me.
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