Question
Two services report their working directories as absolute Unix-style paths (they start with '/' and contain segments separated by single slashes, e.g. '/home/dev/app'). Return the deepest path both share, comparing whole segments — '/x/y' and '/x/yy' share only '/x', not '/x/y'. Return '/' when nothing beyond the root is shared. For example, '/home/dev/app/logs' and '/home/dev/api' share '/home/dev'.
common_path(a: str, b: str) → str["/home/dev/app/logs","/home/dev/api"]out"/home/dev"State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.
Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.