LeetCode Card 347 — Design and LRU Cache / Assess
Pattern signal
This pattern usually appears when the prompt involves object behavior, custom API semantics, and data-structure composition. LRU Cache, Min Stack, randomized set, and iterator or scheduler design prompts fit here.
What Assess means here
In BASIC, the Assess step is where you compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits. For Design and LRU Cache, that matters because the pattern only becomes useful once the candidate is explicit about what is being tracked, reduced, or preserved.
Interview move
A strong move is to compare plausible approaches before committing. In this pattern family, say out loud what representation makes the problem easier: the map entry, the pointer invariant, the recursion contract, the queue contents, or the DP state. That keeps the implementation attached to a reason.
Common miss
The miss is focusing on method signatures before deciding the core invariants and representation. BASIC reduces that risk because the stage sequence forces you to earn the implementation instead of jumping straight into it.
BASIC prompt
“Given that this looks like Design and LRU Cache, what is the simplest way to compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits?”