From Side Project to Career Platform: Building AissenceAI

From Side Project to Career Platform: Building AissenceAI AissenceAI started as a weekend project to solve a personal frustration: the gap between interview preparation and actual interview performance. Most candidates prepare extensively but freeze when facing unexpected questions in live interviews. The Problem: Preparation Does Not Equal Performance 70% of candidates report anxiety during interviews. Practicing answers alone does not help when a curveball comes. I experienced this firsthand during a Google interview. After 3 months of prep, I froze when asked an unexpected system design question. The First Prototype The first version was a weekend hackathon: Next.js frontend + OpenAI API. Simple - paste a question, get an answer. The problem? 2-3 second response time. Completely unusable for live interviews. Key insight: Speed is everything. The AI response needs to feel like your own thinking. The 116ms Breakthrough Getting to 116ms required rethinking the entire pipeline: Switched