What is Mitchell Hashimoto's whiteboard test for understanding a codebase built with AI?

As Steve Huynh describes it on A Life Engineered, Mitchell Hashimoto's whiteboard test says you should understand your system well enough to draw it on a whiteboard and explain what each component does and how the components interact. The guest calls the test very reasonable and possibly the better way to explain the idea to junior engineers.

• The guest's reading of the test is that you whiteboard a system so someone else can understand it, usually because they want to change something.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-27). Read the whole episode summary →

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