2026-08-31
A weird thing is happening in engineering interviews. Companies hire engineers who will spend all day using AI coding tools. Then they interview them in an environment where those tools are banned. I don't think that makes sense forever.
I care less about whether you use AI
Of course you use AI. Most good engineers I know do now.
The interesting part is how you use it.
Can you give the model the right context? Can you recognize when it is confidently wrong? Do you understand the generated code? Can you debug when the agent gets stuck? Do you know when writing it yourself is faster? Can you make architectural decisions without asking Claude to make every decision for you?
Those are increasingly real engineering skills.
Agent conversations might become a hiring signal
This is one of the things we're experimenting with at DevLabs.
A resume shows the final claim: built an authentication system. An agent trace can potentially show some of the process.
What did you ask? What did you notice? What went wrong? How did you recover? What decisions did you override?
That is fascinating from a hiring perspective. Obviously, you shouldn't reduce someone to an AI conversation either. But combined with projects, code, and real outcomes, it can add another dimension.
Interviews should move closer to real work
I think technical hiring is going to get less artificial.
Less memorization. Less pretending Google doesn't exist. Less pretending AI doesn't exist.
More: here is a real problem. Here are the tools you normally use. Let's see how you approach it.
That seems much closer to what companies actually want to know. Can this person build?