First year · Entrance paper

Four questions. A seat.

There is no wrong faculty. There is a grain to how you already think. We start there, then we make you sit the other rooms anyway.

1. 01

   You have 36 hours and a vague prompt. First move?

   • Write five ways to lose, then invert them into requirements.
   • Write the corridor sentence and the demo script before the repo exists.
   • Ask a model for the twelve products 80 teams will ship — then kill the list.

2. 02

   A model just wrote your architecture. You…

   • Ask what the designer of this stack never imagined someone would try.
   • Throw away anything that is not a ticket in the demo script.
   • Strike every line that is importance-signalling: agents, vector stores, k8s-for-a-form.

3. 03

   The constraint looks fatal: no designer, eight hours, dead API.

   • Put the constraint on the title slide. Missing is the aesthetic.
   • Seat three chairs that still demo if the API never wakes up.
   • Give the intern a mean brief that names the constraint, then dispose of the pretty system it offers.

4. 04

   A judge says this already exists. Remaining minute:

   • Agree, then name the grain the existing thing was never designed for.
   • Name the existing thing, then the minute it fails — that failure is the product.
   • Refuse the intern's feature-comparison table. Put a body in the answer instead.