Learning handbooks#
A prep plan tells you what to do. A handbook teaches you the thing.
Build the handbook on an application page produces a single, self-contained HTML study guide for that role: what the company actually does, the substance the interview will test, that employer's hard problems, and what to say — plus flashcards, a glossary, a story bank and a checklist.
It opens in its own tab, because it is a whole document rather than a panel, and Download gives you the same bytes as a file.
What is in one#
| Section | What it is |
|---|---|
| Reading routes | Two to four paths through it — ten minutes, an evening, everything — so there is somewhere to go when you are short on time. |
| Parts | Five to eight taught sections, each opening with a three-line TL;DR. Tables, worked examples and code where code is the clearest explanation. |
| Diagrams | Animated where a topic has a shape — a path a request takes, layers of a system, a retry loop that closes on itself. Layer diagrams are clickable. |
| Callouts | Say it like this for phrasing you can adapt out loud, Trap for the mistakes people make, Why it matters here for the link back to this employer. |
| Practice cards | Twenty to thirty recall cards, grouped by topic, with the points a strong answer hits. Mark them off as they stick. |
| Glossary | Every acronym the loop could use, filterable — including the ones that mean two different things. |
| Story bank | Prompts only. Alfred will not invent your experience; you write the answers and they save in the browser. |
| Questions to ask | Grouped by who you are talking to. |
| Checklist | The day before, the day itself, afterwards. |
It teaches the prep plan#
The handbook and the prep plan are not two lists of the same thing. The prep plan is the to-do list; the handbook is where the knowledge lives.
When Alfred plans the handbook it allocates every prep item to exactly one part, and that part is then responsible for teaching the substance behind it — the pattern behind a coding problem and how to recognise it, the concept itself, how to work through a design prompt, what a strong version of a story contains. A part that said "revise consistent hashing" would have failed; the part is where consistent hashing gets explained.
So you should be able to close the handbook and answer on the topic from what you just read, rather than being sent somewhere else to learn it.
Reading it#
The top bar carries the tools:
- TL;DR only collapses every part to its three lines — the whole handbook in about ten minutes.
- Focus shows one part at a time, with Next and Previous.
- A 25-minute timer, because one part per sprint is a good pace.
- Light and dark, and Print, which lays it out for paper or PDF with the card answers shown and the animations stilled.
Diagrams animate by default and stop entirely if your system asks for reduced motion.
Ticking I've got this fills the progress bar at the top. Progress, the cards you know, your checklist and your drafted stories all save in whichever browser you opened it in — they never leave the machine, and a downloaded copy keeps them too.
Built a part at a time
Alfred writes the spine first, then each part in its own pass, then the practice material. That is not for show: providers cap how much they will write in one answer, and some of them say nothing when they clip it. Asking for a page at a time means no answer is ever long enough to be truncated, progress is real rather than a spinner, and a failure halfway costs one part instead of the document.
It takes a few minutes. It is the longest thing Alfred writes.
What to trust#
A handbook is written by a language model from the job posting and your profile. It is revision notes, not a reference:
- Where it is reasoning from the posting rather than from knowledge, the text says so — "the posting implies", "worth confirming".
- Sources are generated links. Open them before you rely on any of them.
- Nothing in it should be asserted out loud in an interview without you being able to defend it.
Rebuilding replaces the handbook completely, including your ticks and stories — the reader's saved progress is keyed to the handbook, and a new one starts clean rather than inheriting marks that belonged to different parts.