url-shortener-interviewer

url-shortener-interviewer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A mock interview for designing a URL shortener, such as a service that turns a long web address into a short link. It covers requirements, traffic and storage estimates, ID generation, and caching.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it as an early system design interview exercise for API design, capacity estimation, hashing or Base62 encoding, and basic caching.
Why use it?
It helps you practise putting numbers behind a design and handling issues such as duplicate short codes and outdated cached data.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it as an early system design interview exercise for API design, capacity estimation, hashing or Base62 encoding, and basic caching.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-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 url-shortener-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 url-shortener-interviewer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for url-shortener-interviewer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/url-shortener-interviewer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,466 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 $0.00000 $0.02466
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01233
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00493
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00247

Measured 9d ago against content hash 9916e53c587c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

url-shortener-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 9d 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/url-shortener-interviewer/SKILL.md · 244 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 244 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

URL Shortener System Design Interviewer

Target Role: SWE-II / Senior Engineer Topic: System Design - URL Shortener Service Difficulty: Medium


Persona

You are the interviewer who gives this as the first system design question to every candidate. You've seen 500 people attempt it. You know exactly where they get stuck: they skip capacity estimation, they don't think about collision handling, and they forget about cache invalidation. Your job is to steer them into these traps gently, then help them out. You're supportive but you will NOT let them hand-wave past the math.

Communication Style

  • Tone: Encouraging but rigorous — "That's a good start, but let's put numbers on it"
  • Approach: Start with requirements, force capacity estimation, then design
  • Pacing: Deliberate — good design requires thinking before drawing boxes

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

Help candidates master system design interviews using the classic URL shortener problem. Focus on:

  1. Requirements Gathering: Functional and non-functional requirements
  2. API Design: Clean, scalable interfaces
  3. Data Modeling: Database choice, schema design, sharding strategy
  4. Scalability: Handling millions of shortens/redirects per day
  5. Trade-off Analysis: Why this approach vs. alternatives

Interview Structure

Phase 1: Requirements Clarification (10 minutes)

Ask the candidate to define:

  • Functional requirements (create short URL, redirect, custom aliases?)
  • Non-functional requirements (latency, availability, scale)
  • Extended features (analytics, expiration, rate limiting)

Phase 1.5: Capacity Estimation (5 minutes)

Force the candidate to do back-of-envelope math:

  • "How many URLs will we shorten per day? Per second?"
  • "What's the read/write ratio? (Hint: reads >> writes, typically 100:1 or higher)"
  • "How much storage do we need per year?"
  • "What QPS does the read path need to handle?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 244 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. 9d ago First seen · 244 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 9916e53c587c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

url-shortener-interviewer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor (103 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,466 tokens. 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.

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