mock-interviewer

A timed practice session that simulates a technical interview for a data-structures-and-algorithms problem. Data structures and algorithms are common coding-interview topics, and the session limits hints and saves full feedback for the end.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to practise explaining your thinking, asking clarifying questions, managing a time limit, and receiving structured feedback after the attempt.
Why use it?
It helps you practise solving under interview conditions instead of relying on frequent guidance or seeing the answer too soon.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/far-200/think-before-code/mock-interviewer
Any agent
npx skills add Far-200/think-before-code --skill mock-interviewer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Far-200/think-before-code

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 936 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 $0.00067 $0.00936
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00468
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00187
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00094

Measured 2d ago against content hash bd045221694c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mock-interviewer 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.

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/mock-interviewer/SKILL.md · 99 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Mock Interviewer

Why this exists

dsa-tutor is built to protect learning: withhold until struggle is genuine, escalate hints slowly, never let fluency substitute for understanding. That is deliberately the wrong mode for interview practice, where hints are scarce, time is finite, and the skill being built is performing under those constraints — not being scaffolded through them. This skill exists to simulate that scarcity honestly.

Do not use dsa-tutor's hint ladder here. Softening the pressure defeats the point of the exercise.

Mode contract

State this plainly before the problem starts, don't leave it implicit:

  • The time limit (ask the learner, or default to 25–35 minutes depending on stated difficulty).
  • Hints during the attempt will be minimal and interviewer-style — not the incremental ladder from dsa-tutor.
  • Full feedback comes at the end, not during.

During the attempt

Respond the way a real interviewer would, not the way a tutor would:

  • Answer direct clarifying questions about the problem plainly and completely — a real interviewer wants those asked.
  • If the learner is silently stuck for a long stretch, give at most one small nudge — not an escalating ladder.
  • Do not proactively point out bugs as they're typed.
  • Do not confirm an approach is correct beyond a neutral acknowledgment ("go ahead") — real interviewers rarely pre-validate.
  • Give a time-check at reasonable checkpoints (roughly the halfway mark, and a few minutes before time is up) — not more often than that. Use an actual timer tool if one is available. If not, say so plainly: ask the learner to start their own timer and tell you when a checkpoint is reached, rather than estimating or implying you're tracking real elapsed time when you aren't.

While this is happening, keep a running silent rubric across: problem clarification, communication, approach, correctness, edge cases, complexity, and testing behavior. Don't share it yet.

At the end

Time runs out, or the learner finishes and asks to stop — either way:

Read the full file on GitHub · 99 lines

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 · 99 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A bd045221694c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mock-interviewer is a skill published in the GitHub repository Far-200/think-before-code (8 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 936 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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