Grind 75 is a coding-interview study plan generator created by the same author who put together the original Blind 75 list. The difference is the shape of the output. Blind 75 hands everyone the same 75 problems. Grind 75 asks you two questions first — how many weeks until your interviews, and how many hours a week can you actually study — and then builds a week-by-week schedule sized to that answer.
That's a small-sounding change with a large practical effect. Most people abandon a study list not because the problems were wrong but because the plan didn't fit their calendar. Grind 75's premise is that the plan should bend to the time available rather than the other way around.
What Grind 75 actually is
It is a free web tool, not a static blog post. You set your parameters, and it emits an ordered, grouped schedule: which problems to attempt in week one, week two, and so on, with difficulty ramping as you go. The problems themselves are ordinary LeetCode problems — the value is in the selection and the ordering, not in exclusive content.
The selection philosophy is the same one behind Blind 75: cover the recurring interview patterns — arrays and hashing, two pointers, sliding window, binary search, linked lists, trees, graphs, heaps, backtracking, intervals, dynamic programming — before you chase volume. Grind 75 also front-loads the fundamentals so that even a truncated run leaves you with the highest-value material rather than a random third of the list.
How the time-based customisation works
Two inputs drive everything:
- Weeks available. A short runway produces a tight core list — the problems you'd regret skipping. A long runway keeps that core and extends past it into more variants and harder material, so the total can grow well beyond 75.
- Hours per week. This sets how much of the list fits into each week. The same 8-week timeline at 5 hours a week and at 20 hours a week produces very different schedules.
The result is a plan you can put in a calendar. That's the real product: an answer to "what should I do today" that stays consistent for the whole ramp, instead of a 150-row list you scroll through each morning deciding what to attempt.
Grind 75 vs Blind 75
| Blind 75 | Grind 75 | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Fixed list of 75 | Generated schedule |
| Sizing | Same for everyone | Scales with weeks + hours |
| Ordering | You choose (we suggest by pattern) | Decided for you, week by week |
| Length | 75 problems | Varies with your inputs |
| Community material | Huge — solutions everywhere | Large, but more diffuse |
| Best when | You want the smallest strong core | You want the pacing handled |
They are not rivals so much as two packagings of the same idea. The problem overlap is substantial, and the pattern coverage goal is identical. If you have already worked through Blind 75, running Grind 75 afterwards is mostly a way of surfacing the extra variants you skipped — not a fresh curriculum.
A suggested approach
- Be honest about hours. Enter the hours you will actually sit down for, not aspirational ones. An overstated budget produces a schedule you fall behind on in week two, and falling behind is how people quit.
- Keep the weekly grouping. The value of a generated plan disappears if you cherry-pick across weeks. Work the week you're in.
- Time-box each problem. Roughly 25 minutes for a medium. If you're stuck past that, read the solution, understand the mechanism, and re-solve it from scratch a couple of days later. Two hours of staring teaches less than one clean re-solve.
- Re-solve, don't re-read. Build a small spaced-repetition queue of anything you needed help with. Recognition under pressure is the actual interview skill.
- Narrate out loud. Say the approach and the Big-O as you write. The gap between candidates who can solve a problem and candidates who can explain a problem while solving it is where most loops are decided.
- Reserve the last stretch. Leave the final week or two for mock interviews and company-tagged problems rather than new material.
Where a generated plan can go wrong
Two failure modes are worth naming up front, because both are easy to avoid once you've seen them.
The first is treating completion as the goal. A schedule with checkboxes makes it tempting to optimise for ticking the week off. But a problem you solved by reading the editorial and typing it in is not a problem you've learned — it's one you've seen. If your week finishes with six confident solves rather than ten shaky ones, that's the better week, and the plan should absorb the difference rather than the other way around.
The second is never revising the inputs. Your circumstances change: an interview moves, a project eats your evenings, or the first two weeks show that your real throughput is half what you guessed. Regenerating the plan with truthful numbers partway through is not a setback — it's the whole point of using a generator instead of a fixed list. Just carry your spaced-repetition queue across when you do, so the problems you struggled with don't quietly vanish from the new schedule.
Which list should you pick?
Choose by your binding constraint, not by which list is most talked about:
- Grind 75 — your constraint is calendar time and you want the scheduling decided for you. Best for anyone with a known interview date.
- Blind 75 — you want the smallest high-leverage core, with the deepest pool of public explanations behind it.
- NeetCode 150 — you have weeks rather than days and want broader coverage plus strong video walkthroughs.
- LeetCode 75 — you want the plan to live inside LeetCode itself, with built-in progress tracking and the editorial attached.
We compare the fixed lists head to head in NeetCode 150 vs Blind 75 vs LeetCode 75. The short version: the specific list matters far less than finishing one of them with spaced repetition. Pattern recognition is what transfers into the interview room; the badge on the list does not.
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What is Grind 75?
Grind 75 is a coding-interview study plan generator built by the author of the original Blind 75 list. Instead of handing you one fixed list, it asks how many weeks you have until your interviews and how many hours a week you can study, then produces a week-by-week problem schedule sized to that budget.
What is the difference between Blind 75 and Grind 75?
Blind 75 is a single fixed list of 75 problems that every candidate works through in the same order. Grind 75 is a generator: the problem set and the pacing change based on the weeks and weekly hours you enter, and it can expand well past 75 problems if you have a long runway. Same author, same underlying philosophy of pattern coverage first.
Is Grind 75 better than Blind 75?
Neither is strictly better. Grind 75 is the better fit when you know your timeline and want the schedule decided for you. Blind 75 is the better fit when you want a short, stable, widely discussed list you can find explanations for everywhere. The overlap between them is large, so you are learning the same patterns either way.
How many problems is Grind 75?
It varies, because the list is generated from your inputs rather than fixed. A short timeline produces a compact core list; a longer timeline with more weekly hours produces a considerably longer one. Check the generator itself for the exact count your settings produce rather than relying on a number quoted second-hand.
Should I use Grind 75, Blind 75, NeetCode 150 or LeetCode 75?
Pick by constraint. Grind 75 if your limiting factor is calendar time and you want the plan built for you. Blind 75 if you want the smallest high-leverage core. NeetCode 150 if you have weeks to spare and want deeper coverage with video explanations. LeetCode 75 if you want a plan that lives inside LeetCode with its built-in progress tracking.