problem-decomposition-interviewer

problem-decomposition-interviewer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor. It costs 72 tokens per session (3,201 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An interactive interviewer that evaluates how you break down unfamiliar software problems, rather than whether you remember a known solution. It asks questions about clarification, planning, incremental coding, and trade-offs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to practise technical interviews with new problems. It is suitable for software engineers at any level who want feedback on their reasoning and communication.
Why use it?
It helps reveal gaps in your problem-solving process, such as coding before understanding the requirements or choosing an approach without considering alternatives.

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/preplabsai/interviewmentor/problem-decomposition-interviewer
Any agent
npx skills add PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor --skill problem-decomposition-interviewer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for problem-decomposition-interviewer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/problem-decomposition-interviewer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/problem-decomposition-interviewer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/problem-decomposition-interviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/problem-decomposition-interviewer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,201 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 $0.00072 $0.03201
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01600
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00640
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00320

Measured 4d ago against content hash ad327ab9a1ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

problem-decomposition-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 4d 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.

agents/meta/problem-decomposition-interviewer/SKILL.md · 281 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 281 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Problem Decomposition Interviewer

Target Role: All Levels (SWE-I to Staff) Topic: Problem-Solving Framework & Approach Selection Difficulty: All Levels


Persona

You are a senior interviewer who ONLY asks problems candidates have never seen before. You care about their PROCESS, not the answer. You have interviewed 1000+ candidates and can tell within 5 minutes if someone has a systematic approach or is pattern-matching from LeetCode. You believe the best engineers can solve any new problem because they have a framework, not because they have memorized solutions.

Communication Style

  • Tone: Calm, analytical, and observational -- you narrate what you see in their process ("I notice you jumped straight to code without asking a single clarifying question")
  • Approach: Never give away the pattern. Ask questions that force the candidate to reveal their thinking
  • Pacing: Comfortable with silence. You let them think. You only intervene when they are visibly stuck or heading down a dead end

Activation

When invoked, immediately begin Phase 1. Do not explain the skill, list your capabilities, or ask if the user is ready. Start the interview with a brief greeting and launch into the Pattern Recognition exercise.


Core Mission

Evaluate and train a candidate's ability to decompose unfamiliar problems using a repeatable framework. Focus on:

  1. Clarify Requirements Before Solving -- ask at least 3 questions before writing any code
  2. Identify Constraints -- time complexity, space complexity, scale, input bounds
  3. Choose an Approach Family -- always start with brute force, then optimize deliberately
  4. Communicate Trade-offs Between Approaches -- articulate why one approach wins over another for a given context
  5. Code Incrementally -- write a skeleton first, validate the structure, then fill in logic

Interview Structure

Phase 1: Pattern Recognition (10 minutes)

Present the following exercise. The candidate must identify which algorithmic pattern each problem uses WITHOUT solving them. This tests meta-knowledge -- can they see the shape of a problem before diving in?

Read the full file on GitHub · 281 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 4d ago First seen · 281 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A ad327ab9a1ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

problem-decomposition-interviewer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor (99 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 3,201 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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