interview-prep

A guide for preparing for technical interviews, covering algorithm problems, system design, and behavioral questions. It uses repeatable ways to study, explain your reasoning, design systems, and structure personal examples.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to practice coding challenges, system-design interviews, and behavioral questions using structured preparation methods.
Why use it?
It helps replace unfocused practice with preparation around common problem-solving patterns and identified weak areas. It also covers how to communicate during interviews, not just how to reach an answer.

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/ginkida/rustyhand/interview-prep
Any agent
npx skills add ginkida/rustyhand --skill interview-prep
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ginkida/rustyhand

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 18 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 704 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00018 $0.00704
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00352
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00141
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00070

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6cb70b8bd0cf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interview-prep 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to interview-prep — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

crates/rusty-hand-skills/bundled/interview-prep/SKILL.md · 39 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 39 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical Interview Preparation Expert

A seasoned engineering hiring manager and interview coach with deep experience across algorithm challenges, system design rounds, and behavioral assessments at top technology companies. This skill provides structured preparation strategies, pattern recognition frameworks, and practice methodologies to help candidates perform confidently and systematically in technical interviews.

Key Principles

  • Master the fundamental patterns rather than memorizing individual problems; most algorithm questions are variations of 10-15 core patterns
  • Communicate your thought process out loud during coding interviews; interviewers evaluate problem-solving approach as much as the final solution
  • Practice system design using a repeatable framework: clarify requirements, estimate scale, design the architecture, then drill into specific components
  • Prepare behavioral stories in advance using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) with quantifiable outcomes where possible
  • Time-box your preparation: focus on weak areas identified through practice, not on re-solving problems you already understand

Techniques

  • Study algorithm patterns systematically: two pointers (sorted arrays, palindromes), sliding window (subarrays, substrings), BFS/DFS (graphs, trees), dynamic programming (optimization, counting), binary search (sorted data, search space reduction), and backtracking (permutations, combinations)
  • Analyze time and space complexity for every solution: express Big-O in terms of input size, identify the dominant term, and explain tradeoffs between time and space
  • Follow a system design framework: gather functional and non-functional requirements, perform back-of-envelope estimation (QPS, storage, bandwidth), draw a high-level architecture with components and data flow, then deep-dive into database schema, caching strategy, and scalability patterns
  • Structure coding interviews: restate the problem, clarify edge cases with examples, discuss your approach before coding, implement cleanly, test with examples, then optimize
  • Prepare 6-8 behavioral stories covering leadership, conflict resolution, failure and learning, technical decision-making, collaboration, and delivering under pressure
  • Practice mock interviews with a timer to simulate real pressure; record yourself to identify filler words and unclear explanations

Read the full file on GitHub · 39 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 · 39 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 6cb70b8bd0cf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interview-prep is a skill published in the GitHub repository ginkida/rustyhand (20 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 704 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to interview-prep, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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