The Code Has Bugs. Let's Find Them.
Real-world debugging challenges. AI-assisted problem solving. Automated evaluation. Prove your engineering skills one bug at a time.
How RepoHamster Evaluates Engineering Talent
No trivia questions or artificial leetcode puzzles. Pure real-world software debugging in realistic Git repositories.
Select Challenge
Choose from 5 production-grade codebases in TypeScript, Python, or Go, each with deliberate concurrency bugs, memory leaks, or CVEs.
Launch Codespaces
One click opens the exact repository in GitHub Codespaces. Full VS Code in your browser with pre-installed runtimes and dependencies.
Controlled AI Assist
Stuck on a tricky stack trace? Ask the Socratic Hamster AI Assistant. Token budgets and quotas prevent cheating while guiding your diagnosis.
PR & Hidden Tests
Open a GitHub Pull Request. Webhooks trigger our isolated test runner, executing public tests and authoritative hidden security test suites.
Explore Debugging Challenges
Each repository represents a real production outage or vulnerability. Pass all hidden assertions to prove mastery.
AI Assistance That Coaches, Not Cheats
Most AI tools just paste the answer, defeating the purpose of an engineering assessment. RepoHamster uses a strictly controlled Socratic AI Assistant with daily query and token quotas.
Hamster Assistant:
"Notice how `Date.now() - windowMs` compares timestamps. If you prune on read, check if your mutex lock covers the eviction array mutation."
Isolated Sandboxes & Authoritative Hidden Tests
Never trust client-side or candidate GitHub Action results. All submissions are verified on isolated test workers.
Hidden Test Suites
Maintained strictly in RepoHamster's secure database. Tests execute on candidate commits without ever exposing assertion code, expected outputs, or test payloads.
Sanitized Worker Sandboxes
Execution environment scrubs all host secrets (`DATABASE_URL`, API keys). Enforces 30-second kill timeouts and isolated memory buffers to prevent resource exhaustion.
Commit SHA Idempotency
Each unique commit SHA is cryptographically verified against the candidate's PR. Redundant evaluations are skipped, while new pushed commits trigger fresh runs.
Built for Engineers Who Care About Craft
Real developers love solving real software bugs in familiar GitHub environments.
"The Codespaces integration is seamless. I didn't have to spend 2 hours configuring local Go and Python runtimes; I clicked launch, reproduced the race condition, and opened a PR."
Sarah Connor
Senior Distributed Systems Engineer
"Finally an assessment platform that evaluates real engineering judgment. The hidden test suite caught a subtle edge case in our rate limiter that traditional tests completely missed."
Alex Chen
Full-Stack Architect
"As an engineering director, the candidate inspector gives me complete visibility into how candidates think, their commit history, test results, and even their AI queries."
Marcus Vance
VP of Engineering
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to break bugs and ship fixes?
Sign in with your GitHub account, launch Codespaces in seconds, and prove your real-world debugging prowess.