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[ARTICLE · art-20373] src=dev.to pub= topic=ai-tools verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

I Finally Finished My AI Interview Coach (It Only Took Me Getting Rejected to Care)

A developer built an AI interview coach that runs entirely in the browser with no backend, accounts, or subscriptions, requiring only a free API key. The tool conducts full mock interviews across behavioral, technical, and system design modes, asks follow-up questions, scores responses on five dimensions, and generates a study plan. The developer reduced the crash rate from ~30% to ~2% and expanded AI provider support from one to four by leveraging Copilot for boilerplate code while handling system prompts and session flow design independently.

read2 min publishedJun 3, 2026

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

An AI interview coach that runs in your browser. No backend. No accounts. No subscriptions. You bring a free API key, paste your resume and the job description, pick a mode (behavioral, technical, system design, whatever), and it runs a full mock interview. Asks follow-ups, scores you on 5 dimensions, gives you a study plan at the end. I built the first version for the Gemma 4 DEV.to Challenge last month. It kinda worked. But I wouldn't have used it myself, and that bothered me. Live: hajirufai.github.io/gemma4-interview-coach

Repo: github.com/hajirufai/gemma4-interview-coach

Before After
Lines of code 792 1,367
AI providers 1 4
Voice support Nope Mic + speaker
Error recovery Pray Auto-retry + backoff
API validation Nope Test button
Default model 12B 31B
Crash rate in sessions ~30% ~2%

I'll be honest about where Copilot carried its weight and where I turned it off. Where it saved me real time:

The Speech Recognition API has a bunch of browser-prefix nonsense (webkitSpeechRecognition

vs SpeechRecognition

). I typed function initVoiceInput

and Copilot filled in the whole setup — event handlers, interim results, confidence thresholds. I tweaked the auto-stop timing and UI hooks, but the boilerplate was right on first try. Same story with the multi-provider fetch calls. After writing the Google AI Studio integration, Copilot predicted the OpenRouter request format almost perfectly when I started the next function. Just needed to adjust a couple headers. And CSS animations — the mic pulse effect, dark mode transitions, the glass morphism stuff. Copilot's suggestions were honestly better than what I'd write by hand. It knows the modern patterns. The retry-with-backoff logic was another clean one. I typed async function callWithRetry

and got exponential backoff with proper error classification (retry 500s, fail fast on 401s) without spelling it out. Where I ignored Copilot completely:

System prompts. The interview coach personality, scoring rubric, how it gives feedback — that needed careful thinking about what makes a good mock interview. Copilot's suggestions were generic motivational speaker stuff. Not useful. Session flow decisions too. When to show the mid-session scorecard, how to handle conversation context across questions, when to auto-scroll — these need design thinking, not autocomplete. My honest take: Copilot didn't write this app. But it cut out maybe 40% of the typing on the parts where I already knew what I wanted. The activation energy to come back to an old project is the hardest part. Having Copilot handle the boring bits meant I could focus on the decisions that actually mattered. ---

Try it: hajirufai.github.io/gemma4-interview-coach. All you need is a free key from Google AI Studio — takes 30 seconds. If you're prepping for interviews, give the voice mode a shot. Talking through answers out loud is a completely different experience than typing them. Let me know which mode you found most useful 👇

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