interview-prep

interview-prep is a skill for Claude Code from sethdford/claude-skills. It costs 31 tokens per session (671 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for practising software-architecture interview questions, such as designing a social network, payment system, search service, or messaging app.

In plain words
What is it for?
Studying common system designs, practising structured answers, discussing trade-offs, and preparing for architecture interviews.
Why use it?
It helps candidates explain requirements, trade-offs, communication choices, scale, reliability, and cost under interview conditions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the architect-toolkit plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit Studying common system designs, practising structured answers, discussing trade-offs, and preparing for architecture interviews.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sethdford/claude-skills/interview-prep
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 sethdford/claude-skills --skill interview-prep
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sethdford/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install architect-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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 interview-prep

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/interview-prep.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/interview-prep)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/interview-prep"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/interview-prep.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 671 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 $0.00031 $0.00671
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00336
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00134
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00067

Measured 8d ago against content hash 5ba065582dc7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interview-prep 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 8d 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.

architect/architect-toolkit/skills/interview-prep/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interview Prep

Prepare for architecture interview questions and system design scenarios.

Context

You are preparing for architecture interviews. Practice system design problems, articulate trade-offs, communicate clearly under pressure. Study common patterns and real-world constraints.

Domain Context

Based on architecture interview best practices:

  • System Design Questions: "Design Instagram", "Design distributed cache", "Design payment system"
  • Communication Skills: Clarify requirements, think out loud, accept feedback, adjust design
  • Trade-off Discussion: Consistency vs availability, latency vs cost, flexibility vs simplicity
  • Real-World Constraints: Assume realistic team size, budget, deployment platform

Instructions

  1. Study Common Systems:

    • Social media (Facebook, Instagram): scale, feed generation, notifications
    • Payments (Stripe, PayPal): transactions, fraud detection, reconciliation
    • Search (Google): indexing, ranking, distributed retrieval
    • Messaging (WhatsApp, Slack): realtime, reliability, scalability
  2. Practice System Design Problem:

    • Clarify: Scale (1M users, 1B records)? Growth (100x in 2 years)? Consistency (strong or eventual)?
    • Sketch: Components, data model, communication, scaling strategy
    • Discuss: What would you change at 10x scale? Where are bottlenecks? What are risks?
  3. Prepare Answers to Common Questions:

    • "How would you scale this to 10x?"
    • "How does this fail?"
    • "What's the biggest risk?"
    • "How would you monitor this?"
    • "What would you do differently with more resources?"
  4. Practice Communication:

    • Think out loud. "I'm thinking about SQL vs NoSQL because..."
    • Accept feedback. "Good point, that would break my design. Let me reconsider..."
    • Ask clarifying questions. "How much data? How many users? What's the latency requirement?"
  5. Mock Interviews: Practice with peer or mentor. Get feedback on communication, technical depth, trade-off reasoning.

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 lines

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. 8d ago First seen · 62 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 5ba065582dc7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interview-prep is a skill published in the GitHub repository sethdford/claude-skills (39 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 671 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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