The interview process began with a phone screen, followed by a coding challenge. The phone screen was standard. The technical screen was also standard, though the interviewer was 15 minutes late. I had to email the recruiter to confirm if the interview was still proceeding.

I breezed through the coding challenge with time to spare. However, I heard back the next day that they weren't moving forward because they "wanted cleaner code." It wasn't a clear response, but if I were to give advice, I'd suggest focusing less on functionality and more on writing code that fits their style.

Use React to create a 4x4 grid where each cell can have a normal, active, or dead state. This state should be reflected with colors.

Clicking a cell will toggle it between normal and active. If you activate a normal cell while another cell is active, those two cells will "fight." This fight uses a random number to determine the outcome: one cell will return to normal, and the other will become dead.

At the end, output the winning cell and all the cells that it defeated.

Follow-up: What would you change about the code if you were going to add more functionality to the cells later?