Design a prompt-sharing platform
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
The interviewer gives you a fixed high-level architecture: client -> web server -> database. Do not spend time redrawing the whole system.
Design the product and backend behavior for a web application where users can create, edit, save, and share long AI prompts with other users.
Discuss all of the following:
1. Define the main user flows and explain why each one matters.
2. Design the database schema and the most important indexes.
3. Explain how sharing should work, including permission models.
4. Explain how the system should scale if a shared prompt suddenly becomes viral.
5. Explain how access revocation should work when the owner removes a user or disables a shared link.
6. Explain how to handle very long prompts.
7. Explain what happens when the same prompt is open in multiple browser tabs and is edited concurrently.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design competencies including product and backend architecture, data modeling and indexing, permission and sharing models, scalability under viral load, access revocation, handling large payloads, and concurrency control for collaborative edits.