The instinct is to grade the codebase. Grade the feedback loop instead: a repo with no docs and a 90-second test command is friendlier to an agent than a beautifully documented one whose suite takes 40 minutes and flakes 8% of the time, and the arithmetic on that second number is worse than it looks.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The instinct is to grade the codebase. Grade the feedback loop instead: a repo with no docs and a 90-second test command is friendlier to an agent than a beautifully documented one whose suite takes 40 minutes and flakes 8% of the time, and the arithmetic on that second number is worse than it looks.
Most candidates answer this as a code-quality question and produce a checklist that would improve any repo: more tests, better docs, cleaner modules. That answer is unfalsifiable and forgettable. The two things being scored are whether you can say what an agent needs that a human does not, and whether you audit by running something rather than by reading. A candidate who says out loud that flaky tests are worse than absent tests, and can explain why the asymmetry exists for an agent and not for a person, has usually done this work.
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