Product design question
Design a feature that helps teams review AI-generated code safely.
- Cursor
- Product design
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product design for a trust and safety layer inside a developer tool, balancing speed with code-review rigor.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: individual developers reviewing their own AI output versus a tech lead reviewing a team's AI-generated PRs.
- Identify the core risk: AI code can look correct but introduce subtle bugs, security issues, or license violations.
- Design a review flow: an AI-generated diff gets an automatic risk score based on factors like touching auth code, dependencies, or test coverage change.
- Add a lightweight explanation layer, where the AI summarizes what changed and why, so a human reviewer does not have to re-derive intent.
- Integrate with existing workflows, such as flagging risky AI diffs in the PR view before merge rather than a separate tool.
- Define success metrics: reduction in AI-introduced bugs reaching production, and reviewer time spent per AI-generated PR.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a concrete risk category (security, license, silent logic errors) instead of 'AI might be wrong'.
- Integrates the review feature into the existing PR workflow instead of a bolt-on separate tool developers will ignore.
- Proposes a risk-scoring heuristic tied to what code was touched, which is more actionable than a generic confidence score.
- Balances speed and safety by only slowing down high-risk changes, not every AI suggestion.
- Defines a measurable outcome tied to bugs caught, not just feature usage.
Common mistakes
- Designing a review tool so heavy it defeats the speed benefit of AI coding.
- Not distinguishing risk levels, treating every AI change the same.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you calibrate the risk score to avoid false alarms?
- How would this work for a solo developer with no reviewer?
- How would you measure whether the feature actually reduces bugs?
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More questions from Cursor
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop