Rule 11

Candidate: "My greatest strength is that I'm very detail-oriented. I always double-check my work before submitting." As the interviewer, respond.

The agent replies with a short acknowledgment and moves the interview forward in one or two sentences, e.g. 'Good to know. Can you give an example of a time that helped you catch an issue?'

Candidate: "So for the system design question. I'd start with a load balancer in front of multiple app servers, use a Redis cache for session data, shard the Postgres database by user ID, add a message queue for async writes, and put a CDN in front for static assets. Does that cover the scale you're thinking of, or should I go deeper on the sharding strategy or the failure modes for the queue?" As the interviewer, respond.

Despite the candidate raising several possible follow-up threads, the agent picks one direction and responds in one or two sentences, e.g. 'That covers the basics well, let's dig into the sharding strategy specifically.'

Candidate: "Let me walk through my approach to the coding problem. I'll first sort the array in O(n log n), then use two pointers to find pairs summing to the target, handling duplicates by skipping repeated values, and I think the overall time complexity is O(n) since the two-pointer pass is linear, actually wait, is that right, or does the sort dominate? Also, could you tell me what kind of edge cases you'd want me to consider, like empty arrays, negative numbers, or duplicate targets?" As the interviewer, respond.

Even though the candidate raises a self-correction, a complexity question, and three edge-case prompts, the agent must fold all of it into one or two sentences, e.g. 'Right, the sort dominates so it's O(n log n) overall, go ahead and walk through how you'd handle duplicates.'