discovery

This is a discovery question wearing an ML costume. The strongest candidates run a four-step translation from business pain to loss function, and put a number on each error before choosing anything.

The round is conversational discovery plus live Excalidraw diagramming, and it's graded on sequence: candidates who draw before asking fail. The discovery battery, the voice-pipeline boxes worth drawing, and the latency budget that anchors the whole design.

The modal opener for FDE customer rounds, and most engineers fail it in the first 90 seconds by pitching architecture. Here's the question sequence that scores, and the trap hidden in the word 'chatbot.'

The verbatim opener from Anthropic's customer-simulation round, reported as the highest-signal stage of the loop. The word 'convince' is the trap: candidates who pitch lose, and the winning move is almost no pitching at all.