[michael_mroczka]

AI can absolutely help you. A lot of the benefits of the book come from the reasoning, though, which AI cannot do. For instance, you might try a question, and the optimal answer uses a heap, but how did we intuit that? What repeatable reasoning steps could we walk through to do that for a different problem? That's what 500 pages in this book is about. XD

[blindriver]

You are incorrect. ChatGPT will absolutely tell you why the optimal answer would use a heap. I've found that ChatGPT is much, much better than any book resource because it amalgamates answers from everywhere into a coherent answer and you can keep asking questions about it to gain deeper understanding, as opposed to a book where if you don't understand that's it.

[michael_mroczka]

Hey friend, totally okay if we don’t see eye to eye on this. No big deal. But just to share my perspective—if you ask ChatGPT to break down a genuinely hard, new problem (not something that’s been around forever with tons of tutorials and blog posts), the explanations tend to stay pretty surface-level. For example, you might get something like, “We need to use DFS because we need to search the graph.” It doesn’t really get into the deeper reasoning behind why that’s the right approach or what led to this decision when others were possible.

There’s actually some interesting data on this here: How hard is it to cheat with ChatGPT in technical interviews?

Even AI experts point out that parroting tutorials isn’t real reasoning, and that’s still a tough spot for AI.

All that said, even if AI improves, I still think this book offers a lot of value. It’s packed with new templates and practical strategies to help you get unstuck during interviews—stuff based on data from over 100,000 mock interviews. No pressure if it’s not your thing, but if you’re curious, you can check out some of the technical (and non-technical) chapters at the link below. They cover approaches you definitely won’t see ChatGPT come up with. :)

https://bctci.co/free-chapters