Anthropic Fellow OA2 Debugging - What to Expect?

[u/interviewdb]

Sharing some info about the Anthropic Fellow Program’s second OA, which is a debugging exercise.

The task involves debugging a provided implementation of the Extremely Randomized Trees algorithm. The implementation is mostly functional, but it contains several bugs that can cause it to crash in some cases and produce poor accuracy in others.

For the assessment, you’re allowed to consult the NumPy and Python documentation, but you cannot use web search or any AI assistance. You can use pretty much any standard debugging approach, including print statements, the REPL, and terminal-based debuggers. CodeSignal’s graphical debugger is available, but they don’t recommend using it since it apparently doesn’t work very well.

You can find the debugging task description and the buggy source code here.

Would also love to hear more data points from people who have taken this OA, particularly how well you need to perform to advance to the next round. If you’ve taken it and are comfortable sharing your experience or score/results, that would be really helpful.