Product design question
Design the hand-off UX between a human engineer and Devin.
- Cognition
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product design for trust and control in human-AI collaboration, specifically the moment an autonomous agent transfers work back to a person.
How to approach it
- Clarify the scenario: Devin completes a task autonomously and needs a human engineer to review, approve, or take over.
- Identify the core need: the engineer must quickly understand what Devin did and why, without re-reading every line of code from scratch.
- Design the handoff artifact: a structured summary showing the plan Devin followed, key decisions made, files touched, and any assumptions it had to make.
- Add a confidence signal: Devin flags parts of the task it was unsure about, such as an ambiguous requirement or a test it could not verify.
- Build an easy path to iterate: the engineer can comment on a specific decision and have Devin revise just that part, rather than starting over.
- Define success metrics: time for an engineer to review and approve a Devin PR, and rate of PRs merged without major rework.
What a strong answer includes
- Treats the handoff as a distinct design surface, not just a normal PR view, since trust in autonomous work is different from trust in human-written code.
- Proposes a concrete confidence-flagging mechanism so engineers know where to focus review attention.
- Designs for iterative correction (revise one decision) instead of forcing a full restart when something is wrong.
- Uses review time and rework rate as measurable proxies for trust and quality.
- Acknowledges that over-trusting Devin is as risky as under-trusting it, and designs against both failure modes.
Common mistakes
- Treating the handoff like a standard code review with no extra context about the AI's reasoning.
- Not addressing how a human corrects specific parts of Devin's work without a full restart.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you flag parts of the task Devin was uncertain about?
- How would you measure whether engineers trust the handoff over time?
- What would you do if engineers started rubber-stamping Devin's PRs?
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More questions from Cognition
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