Code Room
CodingMediumcod-g857
Subject SpiralLevel Mid–Senior~30 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

You start at cell (rStart, cStart) of a rows x cols grid facing east and walk in a clockwise spiral of ever-increasing radius (east, south, west, north, with the step length growing every two turns). Whenever you step onto a cell inside the grid, record it. Continue until you have recorded every cell of the grid. Return the list of visited cells in order, each as [row, col].

Implement
spiral_matrix_iii(rows: int, cols: int, rStart: int, cStart: int) → list[list[int]]
Examples
in[1,4,0,0]out[[0,0],[0,1],[0,2],[0,3]]
What a strong answer looks like

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.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.