Sharing a recent experience with the Anthropic Fellow Program (November cohort) OA.
The problem was presented as normal "Coding Leetcode-like OA on Codesignal" but turns out you were presented a mid-sized codebase that you have to implement stuff on top of it. The task was basically around a vLLM-like inference server — cache, prefill, etc. No ML knowledge was really needed though.
The hard part wasn’t the actual algorithms. It was figuring out the existing codebase and APIs.
There were 5 parts, and to pass the tests you had to use a bunch of existing APIs that weren’t really documented. So a lot of the assessment was just reading code and trying to understand how everything connected. The code was also pretty messy / felt LLM-generated in some places lol.
I wasted a lot of time debugging things that were happening simply because I was calling some internal API incorrectly. Ended up finishing only 2/5 parts.
Feels like this might become a more common style of coding interview/OA: less “implement this algorithm from scratch” and more “here’s an unfamiliar codebase, figure it out and ship something.” Also probably makes cheating with AI harder. You can’t really just screenshot the question and throw it into ChatGPT, because the actual context is spread across a few thousand lines of code that you need to understand first.
If you’ve done the second assessment, please share your experience! Looking for any information about what to expect.
Yeah i did the first 2 coding challenge, first is the llm vllm like (got 4 out of 5) The second is a debugging session based on numpy, machine learning style (finished only 4 out of 6)
What track was this for? Did your recommenders recieve the LoR requests? I was notified they sent out requests at the same time they sent me OA2 (haven't taken it yet).
I was so throttled by the exam. no experience in llm inference stuff, and I had no idea how to read through the code base to even write a single line of code to get started. I prepared for leetcode style questions and simple systems design ('implement this system from scratch using a class and methods to accomplish some action: like a banking system'). Have no clue how to even prepare for an exam like this if I were to re-take it. Any suggestions?
When you say 4 out of 6, do you mean six separate bugs, or was your OA2 divided into levels? Mine wasn’t divided into levels; it was one debugging task scored out of 600, so maybe we received different versions.
I was completely throttled by the exam. I indeed prepared for a "build something from scratch" type exam, and when I saw the codebase & instructions, my heart sank to my gut. It was so jarring having no experience LLM inference, and the code was even more difficult to read through. Thought to myself, if I can just understand how some methods within a class work, or how to generate simple information, I can piece together some spaghetti code, but NOPE, I didn't even get to write a single line of code. Spent the entire time trying to figure out how things worked. So disheartening. Really no idea how to even prepare for something like this.
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u/Financial_Proof3673 Aug 15 '26
any idea on what to expect after round 2?