AI Coding interview questions

You are given a coding task and an AI assistant. What do you do before asking it to write any code?

Easy · AI Coding, Workflow, Fresher

How do you break a medium-sized feature into tasks an AI assistant can do well?

Easy · AI Coding, Workflow, Fresher

When should you NOT use the AI assistant during a coding interview or at work?

Easy · AI Coding, Workflow, Fresher

The assistant keeps producing slightly different wrong answers for the same bug. What do you do?

Medium · AI Coding, Workflow, Senior

What context do you give an assistant so that generated code fits an existing service?

Medium · AI Coding, Workflow, Senior

In a 60-minute AI-assisted coding round, how do you split your time?

Medium · AI Coding, Workflow, Senior

What makes a good prompt for generating a function? Rewrite: "write a function to dedupe users".

Easy · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Fresher

Why include input/output examples in a prompt, and how many?

Easy · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Fresher

Would you ask the assistant to write tests first or code first? Why?

Easy · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Fresher

The assistant generated code using a library and API your service doesn't use. How do you prevent this?

Medium · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Senior

The first generated solution works but is O(n²). How do you iterate with the assistant?

Medium · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Senior

How do you use the assistant to understand unfamiliar code rather than to write code?

Medium · AI Coding, Prompting for Code, Senior

The assistant wrote this endpoint to list orders with their customer names. What's wrong?

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

The assistant added @Transactional to make this transfer atomic. Will it work?

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

Review this AI-generated in-memory rate limiter used by many request threads.

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

The assistant wrote a search repository method. Find the problem.

Easy · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

Users are duplicated in a HashSet after this AI-generated class was added. Why?

Easy · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

Review this AI-generated CSV export helper.

Easy · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

Customers report missing and repeated items when paging. Review the generated code.

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

The assistant added error handling to a payment notifier. What's wrong with it?

Easy · AI Coding, Code Review, Senior

The assistant added a cache to speed up a pricing lookup. Review it for production.

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

The assistant wrapped a charge call with retries. What could go wrong?

Hard · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

The assistant parallelized calls to three downstream services. Review it.

Hard · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

Review this AI-generated Kafka consumer that writes events to the database.

Hard · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

Two admins editing the same product sometimes overwrite each other. The assistant's update code is below. Fix it.

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

The assistant wrote a daily report job. Reports for some regions are off by a day. Why?

Medium · AI Coding, Code Review, Staff

The assistant wrote this unit test and says coverage is now 100%. Is the code verified?

Medium · AI Coding, Verification, Senior

How do you systematically find edge cases the AI-generated code may have missed?

Medium · AI Coding, Verification, Senior

When would you use property-based tests to verify AI-generated code? Give an example.

Medium · AI Coding, Verification, Senior

The assistant says its solution is O(n log n). How do you check that claim quickly?

Medium · AI Coding, Verification, Senior

AI-generated repository code passes unit tests with an in-memory database but fails in staging. What's your verification strategy?

Hard · AI Coding, Verification, Staff

What is your personal checklist when reviewing an AI-generated pull request?

Medium · AI Coding, Verification, Staff

How can mutation testing help you trust AI-written tests?

Hard · AI Coding, Verification, Staff

The AI-generated feature is merged. How do you verify it behaves correctly in production?

Hard · AI Coding, Verification, Staff

You must add a new endpoint to an unfamiliar Spring service using an assistant. Walk through your steps.

Medium · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Senior

How do you use an assistant to refactor a 600-line legacy method safely?

Medium · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Senior

The assistant suggests changing a shared utility used by 40 call sites. How do you assess and limit the blast radius?

Hard · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Staff

The assistant keeps generating modern code (records, virtual threads) in a Java 11 legacy service. How do you handle it?

Medium · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Staff

The assistant generated a database migration that adds a NOT NULL column to a 200M-row table. Review the plan.

Hard · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Staff

The assistant renamed a JSON field in a response DTO for clarity. What do you check before accepting it?

Medium · AI Coding, Codebase Extension, Staff

The assistant suggests adding a dependency you've never heard of. What do you check?

Medium · AI Coding, Security & Supply Chain, Staff

A teammate pasted a production config file into an AI chat to debug a connection issue. What's the risk and what should happen?

Medium · AI Coding, Security & Supply Chain, Staff

Review this AI-generated endpoint for downloading invoices.

Medium · AI Coding, Security & Supply Chain, Staff

How do you manage license and IP risk from AI-generated code at company scale?

Hard · AI Coding, Security & Supply Chain, Architect

Your team builds an internal agent that reads tickets and opens pull requests automatically. What security controls do you require?

Hard · AI Coding, Security & Supply Chain, Architect

After adopting AI assistants, PR volume doubled and reviewers are overwhelmed. What do you change?

Medium · AI Coding, Team Adoption, Staff

You're asked to define the engineering org's policy for AI coding assistants. What does it cover?

Hard · AI Coding, Team Adoption, Architect

Leadership asks: is AI actually making us faster? How do you measure it?

Hard · AI Coding, Team Adoption, Architect

What CI/CD guardrails become more important when a lot of code is AI-generated?

Hard · AI Coding, Team Adoption, Architect

How do you make sure junior engineers still build fundamentals when they use AI assistants daily?

Hard · AI Coding, Team Adoption, Architect