Prepare for Interviews
Use the interview modes — plan, practice, debrief — to prepare for a specific interview round, rehearse it with an AI interviewer, and turn every real interview into intelligence for the next one.
The interview modes are career-ops's interview preparation system, shipped in v1.16.0: interview/plan builds a time-blocked prep plan for a specific round, interview/practice runs a realistic mock interview one question at a time, and interview/debrief captures what actually happened so the next round starts smarter. Together they form a loop — plan, practice, interview, debrief, repeat — that compounds across a hiring process.
They complement the older interview-prep mode, which builds your durable foundation (story bank, question bank). The three focused modes are about a specific upcoming round.
What you need first
A workspace with your cv.md and config/profile.yml in place (the Quick Start sets both up). The modes read them to ground every plan and every piece of feedback in your real experience — not generic interview advice.
The loop at a glance
| Mode | When | What you get |
|---|---|---|
interview/plan | The moment a round is scheduled | A time-blocked prep plan sized to the hours you actually have |
interview/practice | Before the round | A realistic mock interview with structured feedback per answer |
interview/debrief | Right after the real interview | An honest per-question assessment + an updated question bank |
Plan: turn a date into a schedule
Give interview/plan the job description and the interview date and time, plus the round type and interviewer if you know them. It reads your CV and profile, runs an honest fit assessment — strengths to anchor on, gaps likely to be tested — and divides the hours you have left into concrete prep blocks.
/career-ops interview/plan
→ Inputs: JD (pasted), interview Thursday 14:00, HM screen with Ana (Eng Manager)
→ Fit assessment: 4 strengths to anchor · 2 gaps ranked by test likelihood
→ Plan (9 hours available):
Block 1 — Lock your narrative (~1.5h): timeline, "why us", strongest proof point
Block 2 — Gap: event-driven architectures (~3h)
Block 3 — Behavioral stories, STAR+R (~2h)
Block 4 — Mock run + comp answer (~1.5h)The plan calibrates to the round: a recruiter screen gets logistics and narrative, not deep internals; a practitioner deep-dive gets depth in the core skill from the JD. If a question bank from a previous round exists, anything you struggled with gets a dedicated block — real performance data outranks inferred risk.
Practice: rehearse against a realistic interviewer
interview/practice plays the interviewer — by name and role if you provide them — and asks one question at a time, staying in character, with natural follow-ups when a real interviewer would push deeper. After each answer you get structured feedback: what landed, what to tighten, and a stronger version of your answer grounded in your actual CV and story bank.
It also tracks the session the way an interviewer would: if you reach for the same story twice, it flags that your example set reads thin; if your answer closes on the wrong domain for the role, it tells you where to land it instead.
Practice is honest about its own limits: if you haven't built a question bank or role-specific prep notes yet, it says so and offers to run interview-prep or interview/plan first, rather than silently running a generic session.
Debrief: never lose an interview's intelligence
Run interview/debrief right after a real interview, while memory is fresh. It walks you through every question you can recall, records how the interviewer reacted, and produces an honest per-question assessment. Then it does the compounding work:
- Updates the question bank — each question marked ✅ / 🟡 / 🔴 based on real performance, not gut feeling.
- Closes the gaps — for every 🔴, it explains the correct answer with a worked example and connects it to a story you already have.
- Extracts new stories — if you told something in the room that isn't in your story bank yet, it builds it into a STAR+R story on the spot.
- Predicts the next round — if you know the format, it forecasts likely questions from the interviewer's role and what this round already covered.
Why this loop works
Interview prep usually resets to zero with every round. The interview modes make it cumulative: what a real interviewer actually asked becomes the highest-priority prep signal for the next round, stored in plain Markdown files (interview-prep/question-bank.md, story-bank.md) that you own, on your machine, like everything else in career-ops.