Over a decade of shipping production software, distributed systems, reference architectures, complex cloud deployments and services at some great companies never stopped my stomach from knotting at the words: live coding interview. The second a whiteboard or shared editor lights up, my mind is arrested: What if I freeze? What if I blank on syntax? In that mental static I forget how English works, not to mention code.

I decided the dread was the real bug—one I will no longer tolerate.

So, I turned the latest AI tools into a private, judgment‑free test rig and set out to desensitize my nervous system the same way therapists treat phobias: repeated, controlled exposure until the fear burns off.

If that means grinding through three thousand problems with ChatGPT and Gemini watching, so be it, because I simply fucking refuse to accept this!

And in the very first session, I experienced a breakthrough…

Attempt number one: ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode + Video – a smashing success

ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode is one of my favorite features. I am currently paying them $200 a month – mostly for unlimited advanced voice.

I wrote about how I use that to sort through my thoughts, get clarity and even do research and work while walking in the woods here.

ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice mode can also see. Showing it a YouTube video and chatting about it live.

So I was a little miffed to realize I had either forgotten about, or never noticed, that advanced voice can also open a video feed from your camera and live-chat about what it sees with you in real-time.

Attempt #1 was a go: I started a new advanced voice chat in the ChatGPT app on my Pixel 8 phone, pointed the camera at my screen, rested it up against a book on my bed and started asking it to give me a mock technical interview while I opened a new Jupyter Notebook in Colab.

There are a couple of attributes that make ChatGPT incredible in this scenario:

• ChatGPT is not a human being, so it cannot subconsciously judge me
• ChatGPT has encyclopedic knowledge of Python programming and anxiety disorders
• Unlike most human interviewers who are irritated with having had this stranger’s 45 min block dropped on their lunchtime, ChatGPT has been intensively trained to serve me and be unfailingly polite

This means you can:

• explain that you’re systematically desensitizing yourself against interview anxiety
• explain that sometimes you’ll “step out” of the mock interview to ask the LLM questions when stuck on syntax, etc.
• ask for progressively harder problems that flex exactly what you’re trying to practice
• constantly practice speaking outloud to it and explaining your thought processes and asking clarifying questions

I froze when ChatGPT started quizzing me

In my first real session, I came to understand why these traits are so amazing, when I experienced a freeze while trying to solve one of the problems sitting alone in my own office!

Normally I would not have felt close enough to the interviewer to explain that I was experiencing panic and needed to recover, but ChatGPT and I go way back, so I told it:

“Huh, I’m having a panic attack right now and I’m completely unable to remember this basic syntax”.

Of course, ChatGPT was unfailingly polite and proper in a perfect British accent, even, and assured me this was all perfectly normal and nothing to stress about. To recall my experience, take a deep breath, remember I know all of this.

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The response did not immediately snap me out of the freeze, but, even more valuably, I was able to sit with the physical experience of the freeze and examine it. I was able to pause, take time and ask myself questions about it: “How does it actually feel?” “Where does it feel to be in my abdomen and throat?” “What are the beliefs underlying this feeling?” “What is this?”.

I sat in silence for a couple of minutes, but didn’t feel too bad about letting ChatGPT just wait on the line for me. Eventually, I was able to breathe and take my time enough that I recovered my composure, was able to start speaking again, and then started getting myself unstuck.

A minute later, I had typed everything in easily and had a working solution that passed the test cases.

I have never been able to recover from a freeze like that in an actual interview.

I knew that I had found something powerful, and worthy of further investigation.

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