Is there a coding interview helper that also works as a system design ai assistant?
ok so context. Backend dev midsize fintech, three years in, our team is getting reorged and i can read the room. been quietly looping since january. the catch is i had not done a real loop since 2022 and yeah the bar moved.
prep stack rn:
leetcode premium for the after-work grind. pramp for free mocks (mixed bag tbh, half the matches cant code a for loop). interviewing.io for paid mocks with ex-faang folks. donne martins system design primer on github for theory.
on paper im as ready as anybody. in practice i keep choking on camera. did a stripe loop last month, blanked on two coding problems i then solved at home in 15 mins that night. the system design round was worse though. dude asks me to design a notification pipeline and my brain just shuts down. not a hmm let me think shutdown. a i have forgotten everything i ever learned shutdown.
so my coworker tells me he ran an ai coding interview assistant during his loop at a series B last fall. nobody flagged it. got the offer. he is honestly like 60% of the engineer i am and hes the one with the new job lol. fine, im listening.
what i need is a coding interview helper that does coding AND a system design ai assistant in the same tool. all my loops are back to back rounds. im not paying for two separate tools when i can barely afford the job hunt as is.
what i tried so far:
one of them is coding-only and goes dark the second system design starts. half my rounds are system design rounds. so that one was useless after the first day.
another one covers both but caps the session at 90 mins. my stripe rounds were almost 2 hours each. tool quitting on you mid-sentence while youre talking through database sharding is somehow worse than just going in raw.
a coworker mentioned one yesterday that supposedly does both, no session cap, way cheaper. havent tried yet, probably will this week.
wanted to ask the room before i lock in. anyone here landed on a coding interview helper that actually does system design without a session cap and without costing more than rent? im already shelling out for leetcode premium and paid mocks. dont need another monster bill.
what did you guys end up using?