AI Overlay for Byteboard Interviews on Mac
Byteboard spun out of Google to replace whiteboard-style coding interviews with project-based assessments graded against a structured rubric. Candidates open a browser tab, work in a VS Code-style IDE, and submit a design doc plus a coding project that human graders score across roughly twenty software engineering skills.
Byteboard ships two products: CoreEval, the async take-home, and CodeCollab, the live pair-programming room. Neither product installs a desktop app or kernel hook. CoreEval is timed but unmonitored beyond the IDE itself, and the graders see your submitted code plus a transcript of in-pad events, not a video of your machine. CodeCollab is a synchronous VS Code-based editor where an interviewer joins the same multi-file workspace and watches your edits in real time.
Key points
- CoreEval is graded by human rubric reviewers from your submitted artifacts, not from a screen recording.
- CodeCollab live sessions stream IDE state, not the host screen; the overlay sits in a different window and is not in scope.
- Byteboard pad logs paste events from within the editor; reading from an off-pad overlay is not the same as pasting into it.
- No browser extension or notarized desktop app is required to take a Byteboard interview.
- The structured rubric weights design reasoning and code organization, both of which still require you to think through the answer yourself.
How it works
┌── macOS host ─────────────────────────────────┐ │ ┌── Safari/Chrome ─────────────┐ │ │ │ ┌── proctoring extension ─┐ │ │ │ │ │ Browser screen-capture │ │ ← reads │ │ │ │ → exam recording │ │ visible │ │ │ └─────────────────────────┘ │ pixels │ │ └──────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │ │ ┌── LDBypass overlay ──────────┐ ← rendered │ │ │ ChatGPT / Claude / Ollama │ excluded │ │ └──────────────────────────────┘ from cap │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Compatibility on Mac
| macOS 14 Sonoma+ | Yes (required for window-privacy API) | ✓ |
| Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) | Native arm64 build | ✓ |
| Intel Macs (2019+) | Universal binary supported | ✓ |
| Byteboard CoreEval (async) | In-pad logging only | ✓ |
| Byteboard CodeCollab (live) | Browser IDE, no host-screen capture | ✓ |
Common questions
Does Byteboard record my screen during a CoreEval assessment?
No. CoreEval is a browser pad that records edits, runs, and pastes inside the pad itself.
Will paste detection flag content I read off the overlay?
CoderPad-style paste detection fires when text is inserted into the editor from the system clipboard.
Are CodeCollab interviewers seeing my whole desktop?
No. The CodeCollab interviewer joins the same browser-based workspace and sees the shared IDE state.
Does Byteboard run any local agent on Mac?
No. The entire experience is web-based.