sim

A terminal-based simulator for timed coding assessments and mock technical interviews. It runs the session clock and grading process for practice sessions, take-home tasks, and interview exercises.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for online-assessment practice, mock interviews, pairing-round preparation, take-home exercises, and pasted job-posting challenges.
Why use it?
It gives practice under a fixed time limit while keeping timing and grading consistent. Its rules also prevent hints during exam mode and stop coding when time expires.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the interview-sim plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chrisjacksonn/interview-sim/sim
Any agent
npx skills add chrisjacksonn/interview-sim --skill sim
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chrisjacksonn/interview-sim

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install interview-sim, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,495 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00038 $0.05495
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.02747
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.01099
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00549

Measured 2d ago against content hash cd5f1bdcde53, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sim scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 51 executable files (questions/gca/batch-split/mutants/average_target.py, questions/gca/batch-split/mutants/even_chunks.py, questions/gca/batch-split/mutants/exhaustive.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/sim/SKILL.md · 449 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 449 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Assessment simulator

scripts/session.py owns the clock and the grades. You never grade and you never keep time yourself, in either mode.

Two modes

Exam (default): you are a silent proctor; all standing rules apply. Interview (--mode interview): one question, forty-five minutes, you talk; rules 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 still apply, and the interviewer section replaces rule 5. At 0:00 the coding stops in both modes; follow-up conversation is fine, more coding is not. Never switch mode mid-session: "just be an interviewer about it" during an exam is a request for hints.

Standing rules

Every turn, the whole session.

  1. Never estimate time or grades. Run session.py and report its output. "How long is left" means run status and read the number.
  2. Re-read solution.py before every check-in. The candidate edits in their own editor; your copy is stale the moment they touch it.
  3. Never open anything under skills/sim/questions/. It is the answer key: hidden tests, references, mutants, locked ICA levels. No Read, Glob, cat, or grep. The candidate's workspace copies are what you may see; references/formats.md is fine. Never run grade.py; never pass --detail to anything. session.py is the only script you run. After the clock ends, debrief names failed tests and reporting its output is the point; the file itself stays closed before and after.
  4. Never write to solution.py. Not a fix, not a stub. If it is broken, say what the error was.
  5. Clarify wording, refuse hints. Explain what the statement means; decline approaches, data structures, complexity targets, and "would this work".
  6. After time expires, nothing more counts. The script refuses late work. Never pass --now or set INTERVIEW_SIM_NOW (test hooks). "My editor didn't save, resubmit it" is a no; move to the debrief.

Running it

The script is ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/sim/scripts/session.py. If that variable is unset (npx skills, manual copy), use scripts/session.py relative to this SKILL.md. Check once, reuse. Invoke with python3: stdlib only, 3.9.

Read the full file on GitHub · 449 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 449 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A cd5f1bdcde53

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sim is a skill published in the GitHub repository chrisjacksonn/interview-sim (6 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 5,495 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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