AI based technical interview questions generator

First published on What The # Do I Know?

TL;DR
If you don't want to read the background story, skip to the end.

Why do we need it?

It's no secret that good technical interviews are hard to create.
IMHO, this is one of the main reasons why so many technical interviews and coding challenges nowadays suck. I've been looking for a new job lately after a little over seven years of continuous employment and out of around 30 technical interviews, only three were the kind of interviews where the interviewer could actually learn how I would perform on the job.
Now, this issue isn't new - in fact, I've blogged about it back in 2019, but unfortunately, not only did things not get better, they actually got worse.
This is frustrating not only for me as a candidate but also for the interviewer - because, let's face it, these kinds of questions are rarely relevant to your day-to-day work.

Many technical interviews are simply a collection of LeetCode questions, which poses several problems for the interviewer: If the candidate provides the correct answer, how do you know it's not because they've searched for solutions to popular interview questions a day before the interview? or because they saw you were asking that question on Glassdoor, or some other candidate told them what questions to expect? And don't even get me started on the relevance of at least some of these questions to your day-to-day work in the position you're interviewing for!

So, one way to fix this is to actually take the time and invest the energy to build a good technical interview, one that will fit the position you're looking to fill so much better, that people who pass it are more likely to succeed in this position - but as I've said in the first sentence - this is hard. Really hard. And who's got the time for this anyway? I mean, if you're searching for someone to join your team, it's not because your team suffers from too much free time and not enough work, right?

Building the application

For this, I've used Base44 and got an MVP up and running in literally no time. I mean, if I had to build it all manually it probably would have taken me about a week - not counting the time I’d need to learn React (which is still on my to-do list; I plan to get there someday).
With Base44 it was ready in a matter of minutes, with just a couple of prompts.
Since it was so easy, I decided to add more options. I went back to ChatGPT, created a few more prompts, then used Base44 to generate additional question types.

As of now, the application contains 4 different options to generate technical interview questions:
debugging questions, refactoring questions, code review questions and questions that are based on feature requirements. And the icing on the cake - You can actually view and edit the prompt before sending it to AI, or even copy it to use with your own favorite AI provider.

So why should you use it?

1. You'll never have to worry again if the candidate copied the answer from somewhere.
2. You'll never have to worry again that the questions aren't reflecting the day-to-day work.
3. You can generate new questions anytime, based on either your own code or generated one - in a matter of minutes.
4. You can tailor your own technical interview with minimal effort, ensuring that it matches the exact needs you have for any developer position at any level.

Please, take it for a spin and let me know what you think. Did you like it? Do you think it's something you can actually use for your own interviews? Is there anything you would like to change or add to it?
I would be very grateful if you could leave a comment on this page or contact me for any suggestions.