Instacart VO Stage 1 done, but that Karat round genuinely broke me

Just finished VO Stage 1 for Instacart last week. 4 YOE, currently at a Series B startup, decided to start testing the waters with bigger companies this cycle.

First two coding rounds honestly felt like I had prepared for the exact right stuff. Decode password came up almost verbatim from 地里, and the second round was the pivot table problem. Got through both pretty cleanly, felt pretty good going into the Karat round.

Then the Karat round hit. I don't even know how to describe it. You're dropped into a 10k-line bus simulation codebase, the AI chat is spitting out walls of text, and the interviewer just keeps moving forward without checking if your code actually runs. I remember thinking at some point, the whole round is testing whether you can use AI to navigate a 10k-line codebase you've never seen, and I just wasn't ready for that format at all.

Finished the priority boarding part fine, started unit tests, then got asked to add wheelchair support and honestly lost track of everything. My own code, the AI output, where I even was in the file. Ngl it was a mess.

Now pending Stage 2 invite. Tbh not sure if I passed Stage 1. Anyone who's done the Karat round here, does the pacing always feel that brutal?