I Cheated on My Google Interview (Sort Of)

Last spring I had a final round with a mid-sized fintech company — four Zoom calls back to back, starting at 9am. By the third one, a system design interview, I had a second laptop open to my left with an AI assistant running. The interviewer never knew. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Let me back up. How I Even Got There I'd been prepping for about six weeks. Leetcode grind, the usual. I'd used Pramp a few times for mock interviews with real humans, which I genuinely think is underrated — there's something about another person watching you that no tool replicates. I'd also done a few sessions on interviewing.io, which is better for senior-level practice because the interviewers are actually ex-FAANG. But I kept hitting the same wall. System design. Every time I'd get a prompt like "design a payments notification system" my brain would go blank for the first 90 seconds. Not because I didn't know the material — I've been building distributed systems for eight years. It was pure