How do you approach this?How to Prepare for a Coding Interview Without an Assistant

Most interview preparation starts from a feeling. A timed read with the editor stripped of autocomplete and assistants replaces the feeling with six dated numbers: recall, tracing, flaw-finding, debugging, idiom, and reviewing generated code. The point of the first read is not the score but the ranking — the two skills that read softest are the ones a short week can actually touch. Everything else stays on the shelf until the interview is over.

A week is enough for a handful of short, focused workouts, and not enough for a syllabus. Alternate the two soft skills day by day so each gets a rest between reps; spaced repetition only credits a review once enough of its interval has passed, so drilling the same topic twice in an evening buys nothing. Keep sessions unassisted and timed, because that is the condition an in-person or proctored round reproduces.

If you take a second read the day before, compare each skill against the first inside both reads' error ranges. A move that clears both bands is a change in the read; anything inside them is noise, however encouraging it looks. Six days is well inside the three-week spacing that makes two reads comparable, so the honest summary is usually 'no measurable change' for most skills — and that is fine. What the week gives you is a calm, rehearsed routine under a clock, not a new number.