Why the engine runs on manual turn mode

The interview engine runs on manual turn mode: the candidate presses Start, answers, and presses Submit. Automatic endpointing was dropped.

The reason is auditability. Every AI decision in the engine logs its rationale and confidence, and every score cites its evidence — a transcript turn, a file and line, a canvas element, or a document chunk. Grading is one judgment per question with three-band confidence gating, falling back deterministically whenever the judge is unsure or the breaker is open. The contradictory-candidate fixture checks that the interviewer catches self-contradiction instead of nodding along.

Guardrails, calibrated judges, contradiction fixtures, audit trails: that is the whole safety story, and manual turns keep every step of it legible.