Autocomplete, instant run, and AI suggestions vanish in the interview. Train without them first.
You write code all day with autocomplete, a debugger, and now AI assistants. Interview coding happens in a bare editor — often a shared doc or whiteboard — with none of that. The gap between "I can build features" and "I can write a correct function from memory under pressure" surprises a lot of strong engineers.
For at least some of your practice, turn the safety nets off. Write solutions in a plain text editor or on paper, then type them in to check. You will quickly find which syntax and standard-library calls you actually know cold versus rely on autocomplete for.
Sorting with a custom comparator, hashmap and set operations, string manipulation, heaps — you should be able to write these without looking them up. In Python, that means dict, set, collections, and heapq; in Java, the Collections framework and streams. Fumbling basic syntax wastes the limited minutes you have and reads as inexperience.
Before declaring you are done, walk through your solution with a small example, out loud, tracking variables by hand. With no debugger to lean on, this is how you catch the off-by-one before the interviewer does.
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