Design an AI playground editor
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a full-stack AI playground web application similar to a chat product, but with one document-like component that interleaves user prompts and model responses in the same view.
The component should support:
- Inserting a prompt at any cursor position inside the editor
- Sending that prompt to an AI model
- Rendering the streamed or final response directly below the prompt that triggered it
- Saving individual prompts or entire sessions
- Sharing saved prompts with other users
- Enforcing privacy and access control for private content, shared links, and team-visible content
Describe the frontend architecture, editor data model, backend APIs, persistence layer, and sharing model. Also explain how you would handle privacy, secure sharing, response streaming, and the user experience of editing and submitting prompts from arbitrary positions in the same component.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates full-stack system design competencies including real-time response streaming, rich-text editor data modeling, backend APIs, persistence strategies, and privacy/access-control mechanisms for an AI-driven, document-like chat interface.