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we used to conduct an interview where you had to log in to a linux VM that we’d “pre-broken” with a handful of obvious footguns (disk full, wrong perms, etc etc) and we had to stop running it because opus 4.6-era could one-shot it

Was the task to diagnose or to fix?

A scheme I've enjoyed from both sides: here are some sheets of paper, each with a snippet of a file printed on. What type of file is it, what's it used for? Samples include shell script, fstab, a bit of HTML, /etc/group.

A variant I've also had from both sides: here's a bag of bits of hardware. Pull a few out and say, generally, what they are and if there's anything unusual about them. I have to admit I found both fun, even as candidate. It was even fun to need hints for the speaker out of a laptop.