Get hired, without the $10k bootcamp.

Bootcamps charge five figures for career prep and dress it up with a “job guarantee.” Here is the same preparation, un-gated and free. No one can honestly promise you a job, so this page won’t. What it does is drill the three things you actually control: proof you can do the work, the concepts interviews test, and how you present yourself.

The honest deal

A recruiter has minutes and a stack of applicants. You can’t control the market, the budget, or who else applied. You can control whether, in those minutes, you look like someone who ships. That comes down to three things, and every one of them is free to build.

1. Proof. A real project someone can click, not a certificate that says you watched videos.
2. Fluency. The handful of concepts that come up in every AI and dev interview, answered cold.
3. Presentation. A resume, GitHub, and answers that are specific, measured, and honest.

1. Build proof that you can do the work

This is the one that actually moves the needle, and the one bootcamps gate behind tuition. You do not need permission or a cohort to build it. One finished, deployed, honestly-described project beats three half-done tutorials and a paid certificate. Keep the proof of what you’ve done here as you go, then turn it into the real thing:

2. Know the concepts cold

Whatever the role, the screen usually probes the same fundamentals. If you’ve worked through KB Cafe’s learning paths, you already know these. Prove it to yourself, these are the kinds of questions that actually come up:

3. Present yourself like someone who ships

Same work, two candidates, different framing, and one gets the call. Presentation is a skill you can practice. A few rules that carry most of the weight:

• Be specific and measured. “Cut response time 40%” beats “improved performance.” Numbers you can back up read as real.
• Make your GitHub the portfolio. A pinned repo with a clean README and a live link does more than a list of skills. Delete or hide the abandoned experiments.
• Match the words to the job post. If they say “RAG” and “evals,” and you’ve done both, say so in their words.
• Never bluff. “I haven’t used that, here’s how I’d pick it up” beats a bluff that collapses on the follow-up question.

4. Walk into the interview knowing the shape

Most AI and dev loops are some mix of these. None should be a surprise:

• Recruiter screen. Fit and motivation. Have a two-sentence story for why this role.
• Technical or take-home. Coding or a small build. Think out loud, state your assumptions, and get something working before you polish it.
• Concept and system questions. The fundamentals from section 2, plus “how would you design X.” It’s fine to ask clarifying questions first.
• Behavioral. Real stories, not slogans. Keep three ready: a win, a failure with a lesson, and a conflict you worked through.

Prep with the AI you already have

You don’t need a paid coach. The assistant you use every day is a tireless mock interviewer. Paste the job description and ask it to grill you on the concepts. Have it review a resume bullet and push you to make it more specific. Use the Prompt Optimizer to sharpen the ask. It’s the same “bring your own AI” idea behind KB Cafe’s practice exercises, applied to your job hunt.