Your agent reads customer emails, queries a private database, and can send messages. Harden it against prompt injection.
This is the lethal trifecta in one sentence, and most candidates reach for a better system prompt. The answer that scores breaks the trifecta architecturally, because no amount of prompting stops indirect injection once all three capabilities are present.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
This is the lethal trifecta in one sentence, and most candidates reach for a better system prompt. The answer that scores breaks the trifecta architecturally, because no amount of prompting stops indirect injection once all three capabilities are present.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
