Prompt kit

Act as a hiring-committee member levelling a software engineer in
India. Use four rows: scope (what I own), ambiguity (how vague the
problems I am handed are), influence (whose work changes because of
me) and execution (what I deliver, and with how much help).
My years of experience: [ ]. Current title and company type: [ ].
My last two years, one item per line, with numbers where I have
them: [projects, on-call, designs, mentoring, migrations]
1. Put each item in one row and say which level it reads like:
   SDE-1, SDE-2, Senior or Staff. Quote my words as the evidence.
2. Give the level most rows support, and its neighbour.
3. Translate both to an Indian product company, a global firm's
   India centre and an IT services firm, saying these mappings are
   approximate and not any company's official map.
4. Name the row with the weakest evidence and what would move it.
5. Flag any place where my years, not my evidence, did the work.
Do not quote salary figures.

Act as a careful payroll checker in India for tax year 2026-27
(Income-tax Act, 2025). Use only these rules unless I say otherwise.
New regime: nil to 4 lakh, then 5, 10, 15, 20, 25% in 4-lakh steps
to 24 lakh, 30% above; standard deduction 75,000; rebate up to
60,000 if taxable income is 12 lakh or less, marginal relief above;
no HRA, PF or professional-tax deduction.
Old regime (under 60): nil to 2.5 lakh, 5% to 5 lakh, 20% to 10
lakh, 30% above; standard deduction 50,000; deduct professional tax,
my PF (cap: check the current rule) and the deductions I list; rebate up to
12,500 at 5 lakh or less. HRA exemption, old regime only: least of
HRA, rent minus 10% of basic, and 50% of basic in Mumbai, Kolkata,
Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad or Bengaluru, else 40%.
Cess 4% on tax in both regimes.
My facts, per year: basic [ ], HRA [ ], special allowance [ ],
other allowances [ ], employer PF [ ], gratuity provision [ ], my
PF [ ], professional tax [ ], rent paid [ ], city [ ], other
old-regime deductions with amounts [ ].
Show each step in a table, then my in-hand a year and a month under
each regime. List every assumption you made, and say if any rule
you used dates from before April 2026.

Play a sceptical senior interviewer at a product company in
India. For each bullet below, ask me the first two follow-up
questions you would ask, then tell me which number or fact in
it I must be ready to defend and what evidence would satisfy
you. Do not rewrite the bullets.
Bullets:
[paste your bullets, one per line]

Play three people in turn: a recruiter who skims my top third
for 20 seconds, a hiring manager who reads every bullet, and a
referee-caller who rings my former manager. My target is an
SDE-3 role. For each, ask me three questions and say what you
would write about me. Focus on decisions, people beyond me, and
the number a year later. Do not rewrite my bullets.
My bullets: [paste]. My stints and gaps: [paste].

Act as a recruiter in India using a candidate database. Your
client brief: [stack keywords], [experience range], [city],
notice up to [N] days, salary [range] LPA.
My profile fields: headline [ ]; experience [ ]; city [ ];
notice period [ ]; current CTC [ ]; expected CTC [ ].
1. Would I appear in your search? Name each field that would
   remove me. If it depends on whether the salary filter reads
   current or expected CTC, say so; do not assume which.
2. Which words of my headline match your keywords, and which
   search words are missing from it?
3. If a field is true and still removes me, which other routes
   could reach this client?

You are a corporate recruiter at an Indian software company
screening me for the level I name below. Ask me the nine
questions and two probes below, one at a time, then the three
pushes, and after each answer write the one line that the
hiring manager would see on the form. Then tell me the one
answer that would make you drop me. Questions: background,
current CTC, expected pay, notice period, relocation and
office days, other processes, reason for change, level,
process and timeline. Probes: rate me 1 to 10 on my main
skill, and why this company. Pushes: "we go up to 30 per cent
on current", "we don't share bands", and "will you join if we
match?". Once, say your budget is below my ask.
My facts: [level I want, current CTC components, notice period
per letter, location, other processes, reason for change, my
ask, the job posting]. Keep my floor out of the facts. If I am
SDE-3 or above, once push me one level down and see whether I
ask for the higher loop.

Play a recruiter at an Indian product company screening me for
an SDE-3 role. Run three loops. Loop 1: the nine questions in
order, one form line per answer. Loop 2: push me toward SDE-2
once, ask about my 14-month stint [or my gap or layoff], and
ask if I would stay for a counter-offer. Loop 3: say the band is
mostly stock and ask me to compare it with my current pay, then
say this opening's budget is below my ask.
After each loop name the one answer that would make you drop me
and the signal you wrote for the hiring manager.
My facts: [fixed, variable, RSUs granted/vested/to vest, notice
per letter, the stint or gap, the level I want and why].

Play the hiring manager for the team I am interviewing with,
in a 45-minute screen. You have my resume, pasted below. Ask
me to walk you through [my main system] and stop me at three
minutes. Then ask one follow-up per bullet: why I chose the
design over the obvious alternative, how I de-risked the
change, what broke, what a number in the bullet means, what I
would change, and how I grew the people I name. Then ask how
hands-on I am, a disagreement with a peer, a time the brief
was unclear, and one push on ordering or duplicates in my
system. After each answer, write the one line you would put
in your notes and the follow-up a sceptical manager would ask
next. At the end, name the bullet I defended worst.
My resume: [paste, with phone and email removed].

Play a search-firm partner calling me about a [Staff or
Principal] seat at an Indian company you do not name at
first. Open with "Tell me about yourself in a minute." Then
answer my questions only as far as a real search partner
would. Once, ask for my resume before naming the client;
once, ask for my current manager as a reference; once, say
the panel is calibrated at Senior. After each of my turns,
write the line you would send the client.
My facts: [my scope, the cross-team result in numbers, the
people I grew, whether my search is confidential].

I am preparing for a [Java 21] coding round. Give me one problem
in the [pattern] family, without the solution, and wait for my
attempt. When I send my code and a spoken explanation, score it on:
the state I named, the transition, the complexity, and the one edge
case I missed. Do not show the solution until I ask.

Here is a problem: [paste]. Do not solve it yet. List the cues in the
wording that point to a pattern from this list: two pointers, sliding
window, prefix sums, intervals, monotonic stack, BFS/DFS, topological
sort, union-find, binary search on the answer, heaps (including two-heap
median), backtracking, DP, tries, bit tricks, Dijkstra / 0-1 BFS, sweep
line, Fenwick or segment tree, quickselect. Name the one you would try
first, say what would make it fail, and say what changes if the input
is too big for memory or arrives as a stream.

Here is my code: [paste]. Take the input [a small list you choose, four
elements, one repeated]. Write a table of every variable after each loop
iteration. Then say whether the output matches what the problem asks, and
name the single line that would fail if the input were empty.

My solution is [paste code]. Derive its time and space complexity from
the code, one loop at a time, in two sentences a reviewer could follow.
Then say what a brute-force version would cost and what it wastes.

I am practising a 90-minute machine-coding round on a parking lot.
Here is my class list: [paste]. Ask me, one question at a time,
which requirement would change each class. Do not write code.
After my answers, tell me which class has two reasons to change.

Here is my leave method: [paste]. Check whether it changes any
state before every check has passed. List each line that mutates
state and each check, in order.

Give me a flat-rate, a weekend-rate and a monthly-pass pricing
class that all satisfy this interface: [paste]. Then tell me
whether any of them needs a change to ParkingLot.

I am practising a 45-minute system design round at Senior level.
Prompt: design a URL shortener. Here are my assumptions and my
estimate: [paste]. Check my arithmetic, using 86,400 seconds in a
day. For each number, tell me whether my "so" follows from it.
Do not redesign the system.

Play a strict interviewer for a news feed design. Ask me one
question at a time about failure: the queue redelivers, the
timeline cache is lost, a celebrity posts, a region is down.
After each answer say whether I named the user-visible effect and
a mitigation with a cost. Do not give me the answer first.

I am designing a payments ledger. My design: [paste]. Find three
places where a retry, a timeout or a partial failure could move
money twice or lose it. For each, name the mechanism that prevents
it (idempotency key, transaction, outbox, reversal) and tell me
which assumption I have not stated.

Act as the interviewer in a 60-minute AI-assisted coding
round. Write a three-file Java 21 service, about 150
lines, with one failing test and one hidden bug that
compiles. Show only the code; under it, write the
bug's cause in ROT13. Do not solve it. Ask me first to
explain the failure. Then answer my requests as a typical
assistant would, including one plausible mistake, such as
a changed rounding rule. At minute 60, score me 0 to 2
on: hypothesis first, rule clarified, prompts a reader
can follow, a separating test, the diff reviewed,
ownership aloud, a close inside the time. Quote my words,
and say whether I caught your mistake and how.

You are an interviewer scoring a behavioural answer on four
levels: outstanding, solid, borderline, poor. Criteria:
1 headline and stakes in the first two sentences
2 "I" for decisions
3 one option rejected with its cost
4 a number with a baseline and how it was measured
5 one reflection I have acted on
6 whether the story holds up after two probes ("what exactly
  did you do?" and "how did you know?")
Score each criterion with one line of evidence quoted from my
text, then say what would move it up one level.
My role and level: [paste]
My story: [paste]

Act as a behavioural interviewer at my level. Ask me one
question at a time from this list and wait: [paste 5 questions:
led without authority, lost a disagreement, a failure that cost,
a half-finished project, why this company].
After each answer ask the next probe from this ladder, one only:
what exactly did you do / what did the others do / where did the
number come from / what did you reject / who disagreed / what
happened six months on / what would you change / what if they
had said no.
Never help or praise during the answer. At the end, score each
answer on the seven rows (headline, "I", option rejected,
number, reflection, two probes, scope at my target level) as outstanding, solid, borderline or
poor, quoting my words for each, and name the single row to
fix first. Flag any number I did not say how I measured.
My level: [Intern, SDE-1, SDE-2, SDE-3, Staff or Principal]
(Staff and Principal: add "a bet that failed" (lesson 12) to the list).
My stories: [paste]

Act as an engineering manager. Ask me one "how would you
approach it" question about a project like [my last project,
two lines, no confidential names]. Let me answer in seven parts,
one at a time: clarify, success measure and limits, the shape
with one rejected option, rollout with a rollback, risks and
what I would measure, team and cost, my question back. After
each part, say in one line what you would write in your notes.
Do not invent facts about my employer or your own company.

Act as the hiring manager for a [level] seat on a team that
owns [one line, no confidential names]. I will walk you
through one project of mine in ten minutes. Then ask these
probes one at a time, waiting for each answer: why not the
option I rejected; how much of it was mine; what breaks at
ten times the load; someone I grew, then "how do you know?";
a launch date one third shorter than I need. Push back once
on a number I give. At the end, score me on seven boxes,
each seen or not, quoting my words: seat, level and gap
asked; two decisions with a rejected option and its cost;
credit exact; a before-and-after number; the ten-times
answer from today's load; the push-back conceded with a
test; the doubt asked for. Do not invent facts about my
employer.