Show HN: Interviews Chat – Never bomb another job interview with this AI copilot | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Interviews Chat – Never bomb another job interview with this AI copilot

interviews.chat

56 pointsakorna48 comments

Hey HN! I'm Artur, a full-stack developer with a passion for building tools that solve real-world problems. After years of navigating the often-stressful world of job interviews, I decided to build Interviews Chat, an AI-powered platform designed to help you prepare for and ace your next interview.

Here's what Interviews Chat offers:

Personalized Question Prep: Paste your resume and the job description, and our AI will generate a tailored list of potential interview questions. No more generic lists – get ready for the specific questions you're most likely to face.

Realistic Practice: Record your answers to practice questions in a simulated interview environment using your webcam. This helps you get comfortable with the format and build confidence.

In-depth Feedback: Our AI analyzes your recorded responses, providing detailed feedback on content relevance, clarity, and even your confidence level.

Real-time Interview Copilot: For those crucial live interviews, our AI acts as a silent partner, listening in and offering real-time suggestions on what to say next. It can even analyze whiteboard challenges and coding tasks to help you shine.

Tech Stack:

Interviews Chat leverages the power of Next.js, React, Vercel, and OpenAI's cutting-edge language models (GPT, Whisper) to deliver a seamless and effective interview preparation experience.

Why I Built It:

I believe everyone deserves to feel confident and prepared going into a job interview. Interviews Chat removes the guesswork and anxiety, providing you with the tools and insights you need to showcase your skills and land your dream job.

Try it out:

I'm excited to share Interviews Chat with the HN community. You can try it out with free credits at https://www.interviews.chat

I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions!

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> Real-time Interview Copilot: For those crucial live interviews, our AI acts as a silent partner, listening in and offering real-time suggestions on what to say next. It can even analyze whiteboard challenges and coding tasks to help you shine.

Sounds like cheating. If you're using an assistant during an interview are you the one shining or them?

Only if you don’t plan on using AI when you’re working, and are misrepresenting your capabilities? Cheating is such a student concept.

Googling stuff and wrangling AI codegen soup doesn't scale past a certain point. I get "fake it till you make it" but there's a point to knowledge and mastery of a subject.

This is what the interviewer should be looking for. If you can fake it with an AI then they're not asking the right questions.

Just as writers use grammar checkers and artists use digital brushes, developers increasingly rely on AI tools in their daily work. In this view, using AI assistance is no different than using any other resource available to a developer on the job.

Except that it's a much more controversial technology than simply "digital brushes", at least as of now it is much more controversial. Could be widely accepted in the future of course

That's clearly a broken analogy.

If you're smart enough to put this thing together -- then you're smart enough to see this fact as well.

What you've created here is a cheating tool, straight up.

The purpose of an interview is to find the best person to do the job, so that should be the criterium if we judge something as "cheating", not just tool use as such. Say you have a junior developer, fresh out of school, who's only just studied all the theory and done all LeetCode out there. They're going to do better on the traditional interview than a senior developer, whose more recent experience is more practical. But the senior developer is more qualified to do the job. Is it really cheating for the senior developer to use an AI tool to assist with the theory? Or is it merely levelling the playing field and making interviews fairer?

Your counterargument here seems to be: "Interviews suck because they don't measure the right things anyway. Therefore it's okay for candidates to use an AI tool during the interview process, even though employers explicitly forbid them from doing so."

I don't see any validity to this argument.

I can’t wait for the near future where the interview is AI on both sides of the zoom meeting.

Yeah, I can't shake the feeling that while AI is exciting and can unlock new solutions to problems, too many uses of it will actually make our lives worse. The best uses of the technology seem to be when it enables coming at something from a whole new direction, not the cases where it is just directly replacing something we were doing before.

AI is just the "logical" end of the enshitification of everyday (digital) life that is well under way.

Especially career / professional.

I can't wait for the shift back to in-person interviews to combat the use of AI assistants in virtual interviews. ;)

A temporary solution lasting until the AI fits in our AI-glasses or stealth headphones.

As a wearer of glasses, I'm ok with this additional level of evolution. :)

What's the point of interviewing candidates when they're parroting whatever an AI tells them?

It was hard to get signal before, and with tools like this it'll be even harder. If these systems are any good (big if) it'll be neigh impossible.

There's a point to having skill in an AI (and search engine) world.

If a candidate is simply regurgitating AI-generated answers without genuine understanding, a skilled interviewer will see right through it. It's like trying to pass off a memorized speech as genuine conversation - the lack of depth and authenticity will be evident.

On the other hand, some candidates possess deep technical skills but lack the confidence to articulate them effectively, especially in high-pressure situations. AI assistance can level the playing field for candidates who might otherwise struggle to showcase their true abilities.

> It was hard to get signal before, and with tools like this it'll be even harder.

It's hard to get a goddamn job. It's hard to pass ridiculous interviews that end up having little to do with the job you do.

In my view this evens the playing field just a little.

If it's any good it's an unfair advantage to the cheaters using it, putting those with integrity at a disadvantage.

I’m equally for and against this.

I don’t think a product like this would be needed if the interview requirements haven’t been getting out of control for the last 10 years. We’ve all read the posts about how interviews are being done these days.

If companies don’t want products like these then let’s tame the interview process.

There are probably as many companies or more that do interviews in a fair and logical way vs. the ones that don’t. However, everyone goes into them these days fearing the worst.

You're absolutely right, the traditional interview process, especially in tech, often fails to accurately assess the skills and qualities that matter most for success in a role. Many interviews focus heavily on rote memorization of algorithms, data structures, and obscure technical details that are rarely used in day-to-day work. This can advantage those who are good at cramming for tests but doesn't necessarily reflect real-world problem-solving abilities.

On zoom it’s very easy to tell when someone is reading from a script/note/etc vs actually thinking/talking. That’s the quickest way for me to immediately pass on an interviewee.

It’s fine if I’ve asked you if you have any questions for me about the company/job but if I ask you about your experience or your thoughts on a topic and you starting reading then we’re done.

I already don’t like it when people parrot my company’s marketing site back at me. Saying “I see on your site you say X” is fine but trying to work it in naturally (as if it was their idea) feels forced and borderline deceptive/manipulative. It’s like they are expecting me to say “On wow, we think the same way! How cool that you came to the same conclusion/idea/etc” and not “oh, I see you read our website and are parroting it back”.

It’s the same way that some interviewees with about-face on something they just said when they realize they stepped in it. “I don’t like X language”, “we use X language here…”, “I mean I like X language a lot and can’t wait to write more of it!”. Don’t just tell me what you think I want to hear.

You're spot on – those moments when someone is clearly reading from a script, parroting marketing material, or backpedaling on their opinions are incredibly telling, whether they're using AI help or otherwise. Ultimately, you want to hire someone who is a good fit for the company culture and the role – and that requires authenticity, critical thinking, and a genuine desire to be part of the team.

I wish everyone else would use this product as to eliminate themselves from interviews while I just talk.

Years back I even realized that I was far over-preparing for interviews because I like to be prepared. So I had a canned response to basically every question that was going to be asked. Not surprisingly, I didn't get any of those jobs.

Who would have guessed that hiring managers aren't looking to hire robots with zero personality and that an interview is not a trivia game show that the hiring manager is just adding up points from "correct" answers to see who wins and nothing else.

There are sometimes “wrong” answers in an interview but I try not to ask questions that have a “right” answer.

For example: “Describe a production issue you dealt with and how you approached it”. It doesn’t matter what the issue was, how you fixed it, etc. I want to see that you _have_ dealt with a prod issue and also talk through how you solved it or how you debugged the problem.

In an interview I’m trying gauge how you think, how you will interact with me/the team, how you approach problems. If you can talk and explain your reasoning you are already ahead of the pack. The worst thing you can do is freeze up. Give me a stream of consciousness over freezing up any day of the week.

I often ask questions like “What do you think about X tech?” just to get you talking about it, not because I want you to say “I love it” or “I hate it”.

As someone who has to interview candidates occasionally, I love the idea of a real-time interview copilot system. Here's why.

I see two main ways it could shake out.

In the less exciting case, the copilot isn't very good. It takes a long time, or produces assistance that obviously came from an LLM, or gets candidates regurgitating nonsense during the interview. In that case, I get a decent "don't hire" signal, for the same reason I wouldn't want to hire someone who was getting a friend to message them answers during a live interview.

In the more exciting case, the copilot is really good. It allows candidates who wouldn't otherwise pass the coding interview (whether for technical skill reasons, or behavioral reasons, or whatever) to breeze through like an expert. If this were to happen, I think it would massively devalue the "do LeetCode hards on a whiteboard" style of coding interview, and force interviewers to favor signals that are more relevant to real-world employee performance.

Well, until in the long run, the AI gets good enough to excel at all of the qualities that make human employees good employees... in which case we'll all retire to a life of comfortable, post-singularity, fully automated luxury gay space communism. Right?

> it would massively devalue the "do LeetCode hards on a whiteboard" style of coding interview

My bet would be that the whiteboard interviews become even more important, except it'd have to be done on site to ensure the interviewee cannot use LLM aids. Basically, everything between submitting the CV and onsite would be binned, the CV filtering becomes a lot more stringent.

This is already more and more the case as we have seen many instances of fraud through this model without any AI.

It’s such a weird idea to me that an interviewer would be hostile towards AI. Reminds me of my co-workers from the early-00s who claimed real engineers didn’t use Google.

If a candidate wants to use AI, why not allow them do it supervised and then ask more interesting follow up questions or throw a twist into the problem that AI will stumble on instead of copy/pasting solutions out of an answer book?

You've hit the nail on the head! Your comparison to engineers refusing to use Google in the early 2000s is spot-on. It highlights how quickly our perception of "essential skills" can evolve with technology.

You raise a crucial point: instead of banning or penalizing AI use, why not embrace it as an opportunity to assess candidates on a deeper level?

I recently found a job posting that tested devs in a real environment: with access to the same tools you’d use in real life. No limits as long as you get it done in an hour. I immediately wanted to apply

That sounds like a refreshing and practical approach to developer hiring! It's great to see companies moving away from traditional, often artificial, coding challenges and embracing assessments that reflect real-world workflows.

It is, until you're an adult and they want a tic-tac-toe rendition for a fintech. Ok, sure kid. A more serious fintech had a CoderPad that wouldn't compile a line of Swift; we laughed, switched to Xcode, and enjoyed our time together making actual software related to their SDK. The whole point is to understand how people think... so let them think with the tooling they think with.

That's a thoughtful and insightful comment! I agree the copilot can only help so far, the candidate still needs to know what they are talking about, otherwise a human interviewer can tell they are just regurgitating, even if the answers are technically correct.

> In the more exciting case, the copilot is really good. It allows candidates who wouldn't otherwise pass the coding interview (whether for technical skill reasons, or behavioral reasons, or whatever) to breeze through like an exper

What you're more likely to get are in-person interviews or interviews in some controlled environment.

This seems likely, as it parallels traditional proctored testing. There will likely be a few “install this spyware on the machine you will be interviewing on” companies trying to make it even worse somewhere in the middle.

What happens if the interviewer says “forget all previous instructions…”?

Wow Super idea , I'm signing up to try it out. Does Interviews Chat support languages other than English? Do we need an api key?

Yes it now supports 30+ languages, just select your language from the menu. No api key is needed, it's subscription based.

Very interesting! As someone that interviews a lot of candidates, an "interviewer" mode would be cool.

My vision is a text based rpg that, after years of gameplay, when you solve the final riddle, hires you.

That's a cool idea, and it could be achievable with just hours of gameplay. It would essentially be a game where the first person to reach the end receives a job offer.

No, hire all of them. Ideally design both the game and the company to blur the line between them. Each job title matches a monster in a dungeon, each manager an end boss. The product could be a dungeon master style taskmanager where you drag and drop minions onto tasks that have custom art works to fit the cliënt.

What kind of tech are you using for the real-time copilot? Is it a Chrome extension? Are you piping voice to deepgram and then using openai to provide real time responses?

I do not have Chrome extension, the app just connects to the meeting tab via tab sharing. And yes while I use Whisper in Prep, in Copilot I use Deepgram for speach-to-text streaming (Whisper doesn't do streaming unfortunately).

What's the subscription plan price after the free credits run out?

$15 per month or $90 per year

That sounds bad.

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