MockEvalio Fixes Repetitive AI Interview Questions With Three-Layer Code Update

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Developer platform MockEvalio identified a pattern where its AI interviewer repeatedly defaulted to variations of 'What would you sacrifice to ship this faster?' during mock interview sessions. On March 27, a code commit explicitly banned that phrase and a related trade-off question from appearing as follow-up openers across all interview prompts. Three separate fixes were implemented: a probability gate reducing strong-answer follow-ups to roughly 35% of the time, direct phrase bans added to every follow-up prompt, and a near-doubling of the AI's sampling temperature from 0.4 to 0.72 to encourage more varied outputs. The two interviewer personas most prone to the repetitive phrasing — FAANG and Startup CTO — received individually rewritten instructions with alternative question angles such as failure modes, incident response, and cost estimates. The developer acknowledged that no single fix would have fully resolved the issue, and that all three changes were needed to address the problem at different layers.

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