Interview prep system

A file-based preparation system for a senior role at a security compliance company: a citation-enforced knowledge base compiled from 100+ sources, ten interviewer personas built from public data, and a mock-interview mode that rehearses in their voices. No app, no database, no server — a folder structure with rules, built in about seven evenings.

Parallel research agents under a hard citation rule, a grading audit that triggers targeted follow-up research for anything below the bar, and a compile step forbidden from generating content — it only merges, deduplicates, and flags contradictions. Multiple agents worked the same folders overnight, coordinated by naming conventions and a handover note rather than any orchestration framework.

• Every claim in the knowledge base carries one of three states — confirmed, inferred, unknown — with inline citations, so facts travel intact when excerpted.
• The agent that writes research is never the agent that grades it: auditor skills are barred from generating content.
• Research files graded below B trigger targeted follow-up rounds aimed only at the specific gaps the audit found.
• Contradictions between credible sources are preserved side by side with an assessment — the system never silently elects a single truth.

• No database, no app, no server: the whole system is markdown on disk, skill definitions, and directory contracts that concurrent agents follow without colliding.
• Coordination happens by filesystem convention — write-once research, append-only reference files, handover files between sessions — not an orchestration framework.
• Markdown compiles to self-contained HTML slide decks with zero external dependencies, and every deck is screenshot-verified before it counts as done.
• Skills were extracted from repetition, not pre-designed: the presentation skill appeared on day four, after the same conversion had been done by hand several times.

• Citations are a data format, not a virtue: claims must carry their sources inline so they survive being merged, split, and excerpted by later steps.
• Keep the writer and the grader separate: the auditing steps are non-generative by rule, so research is never grading itself.
• Realism in rehearsal comes from depth, not hostility — the second question reveals what the first answer rehearsed.
• Contradictions between credible sources get preserved and labeled, not silently resolved — downstream work inherits honest uncertainty.

A general blueprint for becoming rapidly, defensibly conversant in any organization and its people — reusable for due diligence, sales prep, or expert-witness work.

Case study in progress.