August 2026 | Added a System Design Question to AI Collaboration
AccountWe've added "Social Network Home Timeline Design," an interactive system-design problem, to the AI Collaboration format.
Candidates design a home timeline. They interview an AI acting as the product manager to discover the requirements and constraints, then turn that information into a design. The problem statement does not provide the required features, expected scale, quality targets, or development constraints upfront, so candidates must identify the information they need before making design decisions.
Evaluate design decisions and their rationale
Candidates create DESIGN.md from the requirements they have elicited. It contains functional and non-functional requirements, an architecture diagram, an ER diagram, and the design decisions and trade-offs. The diagrams use Mermaid, with an AI agent available to help with the notation.
You can review not only the final design but also what the candidate confirmed, adopted, or rejected through both their conversation history and design document.
Skills you can evaluate
- Problem-solving: deriving a feasible design and alternatives from the scale and quality requirements they discover
- Communication: identifying and confirming the conditions that affect the design in a focused conversation with a non-technical stakeholder
- System design: designing the data model, read and write paths, scalability, and failure behavior with clear rationale
- AI collaboration: using an AI agent to create diagrams and validate the design while making the architecture and trade-off decisions independently
Who it's for
This problem is intended for mid-level to senior engineers who can design backend systems for web services.
How to use it
From the AI Collaboration problem list on the test creation screen, add "Social Network Home Timeline Design."
For an overview of AI Collaboration question types and evaluation, see Understanding the AI Collaboration Format.