Interviewer misunderstands problem examples in Sandbox Topology Replica

[tsai-dianyou]

Description

During the "Sandbox Topology Replica" problem (equivalent to LeetCode 133), I had trouble understanding the problem description and tried asking the interviewer (Jim) about Example 2.

However, Jim repeatedly claimed that I was referring to Example 1. Furthermore, while Example 2 actually has three nodes, Jim insisted that there were only two nodes.

Steps I tried to clarify:

• I typed the example data directly into the code editor for him to see, but he still misunderstood.

• I asked step-by-step questions (e.g., "What does [2,3] mean?"). Sometimes his explanation was correct, but he became inconsistent and still concluded there were only two nodes.

Additional Behavior

Because I kept asking clarifying questions, when there were about 15 minutes left, Jim repeatedly pushed me to start coding and gave dismissive responses to my questions—even though I could not start coding yet because the problem was still not clear to me.

Expected Behavior

The interviewer should correctly recognize the examples and node counts from the problem description, and maintain helpful guidance without rushing the candidate when clarification is still needed.

[jserv]

No other issue reports this, and the code has a likely explanation. The live prompt tells Jim that your screen shows "one or two worked examples" (src/agent/prompts.rs:206), but the examples themselves never reach the prompt: the problem data the interviewer gets has the brief, the contract, the constraints and the hints, and no examples. So when you ask about Example 2, Jim has to guess its contents. For this problem both examples on the page have three services (web/problems/sandbox-topology-replica.json), while the hints talk about a four-service ring, which leaves room to guess wrong.

The fix is to give the interviewer the same examples the page shows, and to leave them out when the candidate hides them (#173, open PR #174), so the two changes need to agree. Being pushed to start coding with 15 minutes left is a separate behavior. If it still happens once Jim can read the examples, open a separate issue for it with the transcript lines.