My big question is whether doing a specially constructed in-person code review might be more effective than coding some challenge? You could make some sort of a

My big question is whether doing a specially constructed in-person code review might be more effective than coding some challenge? You could make some sort of application with a limited size code base but various parts altered both obviously and subtly for discussion and deconstruction during an interview. And then after doing a live discussion and review of the codebase instead of coding, at the end you could discuss architecting a new feature of some of kind at a diagram and psuedocode type level. Seems potentially more pleasant.