Name: What Should I Do In The First 10 Minutes?
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T15:56:22+00:00
Duration: 8 min 6 s
Description: In this lesson we talk about how to strategically approach the first 10 minutes of an AI-assisted coding interview to se

What Should I Do In The First 10 Minutes?

In this lesson we talk about how to strategically approach the first 10 minutes of an AI-assisted coding interview to set yourself up for success.

- **Resist the urge to dive in immediately** — instead of jumping straight into coding or prompting the AI, start by restating the problem in your own words and doing a strategic skim of the codebase to understand existing functionality and function signatures.
- **Uncover hidden requirements** — as you explore the code, actively look for things like bot user filtering, non-active event handling, or data normalization that may not have been spelled out in the prompt, and clarify these with your interviewer.
- **Turn requirements into tests early** — unlike traditional interviews, convert each discovered requirement into an executable test case upfront (using AI to help generate them if needed), since verifying AI-generated code is a core part of the assessment.

In this lesson we talk about how to strategically approach the first 10 minutes of an AI-assisted coding interview to se