Comment by muzani

Job market is hell, but the startup market is hot. If you can build things, you might want to just pick up an AI coding tool, build a micro-saas, and pitch it. Or keep building up your tool, sell it. This can be done within a month full time if you have some dev experience.

"Ideally I would like time to prepare adequately for interviews and really think about what I want to do next"

The question is prepare for what? Hackerrank is fast going out the window. Every company that wants to raise money needs to be an AI company so they're not going to tell you not to use AI during the interview. You can screenshot questions, paste it into a deprecated AI model, and it'll spit out the exact answer.

Using the AI tools if you haven't might also get you your next job. I think interviews might just be falling back to the classic "build the hardest feature we plan to add", and AI means you get to do in a day what would take a month to do before this.