Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article - but perhaps a bit light on details in some places, like:

> I generated a list of the most common interview tasks

How? I suppose they mean gathered, or searched for, not strictly generated?

Also a little light on details of the actual interview.

I'm also a little confused about the listing of "problems" - do they refer to some specific leet-code site's listing of problems?

It seems like half-way between naming an actual algorithm/problem and naming a concrete exercise.

As for:

> How is it that we do not use this "forgotten and forbidden" coding in our daily production code, even though all highly reusable, useful code is essentially an exploitation of the intersection between classical algorithmic thinking and real-world problems?

I'm not sure what to say - most of this stuff lives in library code and data structure implementations for any language in common use?

Indeed the one saving grace of leet code interview is arguably that it shows if the candidate can choose sane data structures (and algorithms) when implementing real-world code?

You are right, I missed some crucial details in the blog entry. I will definitely take your feedback into account for Part 2, where I want to do a more detailed deep dive into the prompting protocols (with maybe some exact examples) and my learning strategy.

To answer your questions:

1. By "generated" I mean that I prompted the LLM incrementally to provide me the list of the next LeetCode problems to do (without the deep research/search function)

2. Yes, the problem names are the exact names from LeetCode. Initially, the LLM suggested this format, and I later forced it to stick to real LeetCode problems.

This allowed me to verify some output independently of the LLM (avoiding hallucinations), cross-check solutions with other materials, and track my progress.

Interestingly, I realized later that the LLM was mostly pulling from the standard Blind 75 problem set, and almost all the problems are from that list.

3. About the "forgotten and forbidden" code: I probably phrased it poorly in the article. As you said, this algorithmic logic is abstracted away in standard libraries and data structures. The disconnect for me (and I suspect for many "business logic" developers too) is that our daily production code rarely requires writing these fundamental structures from scratch, so we do not see the patterns that can also be applied in more high-level business logic. But this is still an in-progress hypothesis in my mind, without detailed examples.

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