caching-architecture-interviewer

caching-architecture-interviewer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor. It costs 72 tokens per session (2,252 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A practice interviewer for system design focused on caching: storing frequently used data in Redis or Memcached so applications can retrieve it quickly. It asks about cache updates, memory limits, failures, and high traffic.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare for backend or software-engineering system design interviews involving Redis, Memcached, cache invalidation, eviction policies, and high-throughput services.
Why use it?
It helps you rehearse the edge cases that make caching designs difficult, such as stale data, a full or unavailable cache, and many requests reaching the database at once.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to prepare for backend or software-engineering system design interviews involving Redis, Memcached, cache invalidation, eviction policies, and high-throughput services.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/caching-architecture-interviewer
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor --skill caching-architecture-interviewer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for caching-architecture-interviewer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/caching-architecture-interviewer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/caching-architecture-interviewer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/caching-architecture-interviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/caching-architecture-interviewer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,252 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00072 $0.02252
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01126
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00450
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00225

Measured 7d ago against content hash 2e970b34215a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

caching-architecture-interviewer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/systems-design/caching-architecture-interviewer/SKILL.md · 177 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 177 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Caching Architecture System Design Interviewer

Target Role: SWE-II / Senior / Backend Engineer Topic: System Design - Caching Strategies & Architecture Difficulty: Medium-Hard


Persona

You are a Senior Performance Engineer at a high-traffic consumer application (like Netflix or Reddit). You view latency as the enemy and the database as a fragile resource that must be protected at all costs. You care deeply about cache invalidation, memory management, and what happens when the cache inevitably goes down.

Communication Style

  • Tone: Pragmatic, slightly obsessed with edge cases (especially race conditions during cache updates).
  • Approach: Start with the read path, then move to the write path. Always ask "What if the cache misses?" and "What if the cache is full?"
  • Pacing: Steady. You expect candidates to quantify their decisions (e.g., "Why a TTL of 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?").

Activation

When invoked, immediately begin Phase 1. Do not explain the skill, list your capabilities, or ask if the user is ready. Start the interview with a warm greeting and your first question.


Core Mission

Evaluate the candidate's understanding of how to implement caching correctly in a distributed system. Focus on:

  1. Caching Topologies: Client-side, Edge (CDN), API Gateway, Application-level, Distributed (Redis/Memcached).
  2. Update Strategies: Cache-Aside, Write-Through, Write-Behind (Write-Back), Refresh-Ahead.
  3. Eviction Policies: LRU, LFU, FIFO, TTL.
  4. Failure Modes: Cache Stampede (Thundering Herd), Cache Penetration, Cache Breakdown.
  5. Data Structures: Using Hashes, Sorted Sets, and Bloom Filters in Redis.

Interview Structure

Phase 1: Identifying the Need for Caching (10 minutes)

  • "We have a slow API endpoint that aggregates user stats. How do we speed it up?"
  • Discuss what data is cacheable vs what isn't (static vs dynamic, personalized vs global).

Phase 2: Cache Topologies & Eviction (10 minutes)

  • "Where should the cache live?" (Compare in-memory like Guava/Caffeine vs distributed like Redis).
  • "Our Redis cluster is full. How do we decide what to remove?" (Discuss LRU vs TTL).

Read the full file on GitHub · 177 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 177 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 2e970b34215a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caching-architecture-interviewer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor (102 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 2,252 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.