AI copilot for live coding interviews
The live coding round is the one where you have nowhere to hide. Your screen is shared, a cursor blinks in a CoderPad or HackerRank editor, and someone is watching the exact moment you stop typing. The problem is rarely that you cannot solve it — it is that the first ninety seconds go quiet while you re-read the prompt, and silence in a watched editor reads as being stuck even when you are thinking. PiriPiri AI sits on your desktop as a floating layer that only you can see, hears the interviewer through your computer’s audio, and can read the problem straight off your screen — so the quiet stretch becomes a sentence you can actually say out loud.
What it does while the editor is on screen
Three things happen without you leaving the tab. The interviewer’s voice is captured from your machine’s own audio output and transcribed as they speak, so a question phrased quickly or over a bad connection is still on the overlay in text. One keystroke — Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Space — captures whatever is on your display and hands it to the model, which is how the actual problem statement, the function signature, and the sample cases reach the AI without you retyping a word of it. And when you want the answer now rather than waiting on the automatic one, Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Enter drafts it immediately. Nothing joins the meeting and the interviewer installs nothing on their side.
The screen capture is the part that matters most in a coding round, because the question usually lives in the editor rather than in what was said. If the interviewer pasted a problem with three constraints and an example table, describing it by voice loses half of it; a capture does not. The overlay itself is left out of that capture, so what the model receives is your editor as the interviewer sees it.
Sharing your screen, precisely explained
Coding rounds mean screen sharing, so it is worth being exact about what the overlay does and does not do. Every PiriPiri AI window is flagged to the operating system as excluded from capture — NSWindowSharingNone on macOS, the equivalent exclude-from-capture flag on Windows. The practical consequence is that the compositor leaves the window out when anything captures the display: a screenshot, a screen recording, or the video stream Zoom, Google Meet or Teams sends when you share. You can share your entire desktop rather than a single window and the interviewer still sees only the editor.
What that does not cover is worth saying plainly, because the two get conflated. Exclusion from capture is about what is drawn into a video frame. It is not concealment from software that scans the processes running on your computer — PiriPiri AI is an ordinary application and appears in your Activity Monitor or Task Manager like any other. If an assessment installs a proctoring agent that inspects running programs, that is a different mechanism entirely and this protection is not aimed at it. You are responsible for following any rules and consent laws that apply to your interview.
Approach first, because that is what is being graded
A watched editor punishes code-dumping in a way a take-home never does. Interviewers in a live round are grading how you constrain the problem, whether you volunteer the failure mode before they ask, and whether you can say what you traded away — and a candidate reading out code they did not reason their way to is obvious within two follow-up questions. So the answer PiriPiri AI drafts is shaped the way a strong engineer talks: the optimal approach and its key data structure in a single line, the invariant that makes it correct, then the steps, then one edge case that genuinely bites — an empty input, a duplicate, an overflow — and finally the time and space cost. The brute-force solution shows up only long enough to say what it costs and why you are beating it.
That order is deliberately the order you should be speaking in. You read the approach line, say it in your own words, start typing, and narrate the invariant as your loop takes shape. The complexity line is already waiting for the question every interviewer asks at the end. Full code appears only where the language and the problem leave no ambiguity, because in this round the shared screen is where code belongs and the typing has to be yours — someone who cannot explain the line they just wrote loses the round regardless of whether it compiles.
If your loop also includes a design round or a general technical screen, the same session covers those: see system design interviews for requirements-first structure and capacity numbers, and technical interviews for thinking out loud across mixed question types.
What it costs
One interview session runs about $2.50, bought as one-time packs that never expire. There is no subscription anywhere in the product, which suits the way coding loops actually happen — four rounds in a fortnight, then nothing for three months — because a quiet month costs you nothing and there is no plan to remember to cancel. Exclusion from screen capture is included on every plan and on the free trial; it is not an upgrade. New accounts start with 3 free sessions of 10 minutes each, no card required. The full ladder is on the pricing page, and the download page has builds for macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon and Windows 10 and 11.
Common questions
Does it work with HackerRank, CoderPad or CodeSignal?
Yes, and it does not need to know which one you are in. PiriPiri AI is a desktop app, not a browser extension and not a plugin for any coding platform: it captures the interviewer's audio from your computer's own sound output, and its screen analysis reads whatever pixels are on the display. Any editor in any browser — CoderPad, HackerRank, CodeSignal, Karat, a shared Google Doc, an IDE the company asked you to install — is just something on screen, so nothing about the platform has to be supported for it to work.
Will the interviewer see the overlay when I share my screen?
No. The overlay window is marked as excluded from screen capture at the operating-system level (NSWindowSharingNone on macOS, WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE on Windows), so it is left out of screenshots, screen recordings, and the video stream a screen share sends. Share your whole desktop in Zoom, Google Meet or Teams and the interviewer sees your editor, with the overlay simply absent from their view. This applies on every plan including the free trial. You are responsible for following any rules and consent laws that apply to your interview.
Does it work on proctored coding platforms?
Be precise about what the protection is. Exclusion from screen capture means the overlay does not appear in screenshots, recordings or a shared screen — that is a rendering-level guarantee, and it holds whether the capture is taken by Zoom or by a proctoring tool. It does not hide PiriPiri AI from software that inspects the list of programs running on your machine, and many proctored assessments do exactly that, on top of rules that forbid outside assistance entirely. If your assessment is proctored, read its rules and decide accordingly; do not assume invisibility on the video feed means invisibility to the platform.
Does it write the code for me?
It leads with the approach, not a finished solution. For a coding question the answer arrives as the optimal approach and its key data structure in one line, the insight or invariant that makes it work, the steps, a real edge case worth calling out, and the time and space complexity — with the brute force mentioned only to say what it costs and why you are beating it. It writes out full code only when the language and the problem are unambiguous, because the shared screen is where code belongs and you are the one typing there. The point is to have something to say while you type, not something to paste.
What does a coding interview cost?
About $2.50 for one interview session, bought as one-time packs that never expire. There is no subscription, so when your interview loop ends the spending stops on its own and there is nothing to cancel. New accounts get 3 free sessions of 10 minutes each with no card, so you can try it on a real practice problem before deciding.