LeetCode #88 — Merge Sorted Array: How to Actually Think About It

This is the first problem in LeetCode's official "Top Interview 150" list — Day 1, Problem 1. If you can think clearly about this one, you have the foundation for roughly 30 other problems in the same family. This episode assumes you already know the 6-phase framework (understand → recognize → brute force → optimize → implement → communicate). We're not going to belabor the structure. Instead, we're going to spend our time on the **actual mental moves** within each phase — the thinking that beginners skip and seniors do automatically. ## What we're doing here You're given two sorted integer arrays, `nums1` and `nums2`, and two integers `m` and `n`. Here's the part everybody misses on first read: **`nums1` is already length `m + n`**. The first `m` slots have real data. The last `n` slot...