For candidates

You should be nervous about the questions, not the software.

No account to create, no trial to start, nothing to configure. Your invitation is a link. It opens the room, and the room already has everything the interview needs.

No account to create. Your invitation is a link.

Before the interview

The commonest way an interview starts badly is twenty minutes of “can you hear me”. So the parts you can settle in advance are settleable in advance.

Know when and what
The invitation says the round, roughly what you will be asked to do, and the time where you are — not UTC, and not the company's zone — with a calendar file attached.
A reminder that helps
The day before and an hour before, with the joining link in it — and, if it is your first one, the download and what to expect.
An answer, either way
When a decision is made you hear the same day, whichever way it went. Nobody is left to find out by silence.
The email a candidate receives the moment a decision is made: subject 'Moving forward for Senior Backend Engineer', sent from the company's own domain, three lines saying they are through to the next round and someone will be in touch with a time.
What a candidate receives three minutes after the decision. Short, sent from your domain, and it says the next thing that happens.

In the room

It is your machine, your tools and, if you want, your own AI.

Write and run real code
A real repository and a real shell. Any language, any toolchain — it is your machine, so whatever works there works here.
Show the thing running
Start your app and the interviewer can open it, without a deployment or a tunnel you had to set up.
Use your own agent, if the round allows it
Sign in to an agent already on your machine and work the way you actually work. The interviewer sees what you asked it and what it did — which is the point, not a gotcha. Some companies turn it off for a round; you will know which before you start.

What is watched, and what is not

If a company turns on the integrity checks, you see the whole list and can say no.

It never reads your screen, your keystrokes, your files or what is in any other application. It cannot stop anything from running. Declining is recorded as declining — not as something worse — and what it does find reaches the interviewer as context rather than a score. You are told all of this in the room, before anything runs.

Practise first

The first time you use a piece of interview software should not be the time it counts.

Start a mock session and invite a friend — another candidate, or somebody willing to play interviewer. They join with a meeting ID and a passcode, in the same room, with the same repository, terminal and agent as the real thing. No company involved and nothing recorded against you.

If you have a link, you already have everything.

Open it and the room opens. If you want to try one first, start a mock session and bring somebody with you.