--- title: Anthropic killed the coding interview; others say just... description: An Anthropic engineer says the coding interview no longer works and has dropped it from his hiring loops. Felix Rieseberg argues it provides no signal and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-killed-the-coding-interview-others-say-just-write-a-function-gqimpmeex twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Anthropic killed the coding interview; others say just write a function | daily.dev og:description: An Anthropic engineer says the coding interview no longer works and has dropped it from his hiring loops. Felix Rieseberg argues it provides no signal and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-killed-the-coding-interview-others-say-just-write-a-function-gqimpmeex og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/GqiMpMeex.png og:image:alt: Anthropic killed the coding interview; others say just write a function og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Anthropic killed the coding interview; others say just write a function **[Trends](https://daily.dev/sources/trends)** · 3 min read · 9 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An Anthropic engineer says the coding interview no longer works and has dropped it from his hiring loops. Felix Rieseberg argues it provides no signal and calls removing it a door for junior engineers. An Anthropic hiring manager now scans resumes and portfolios for small prototypes showing taste, empathy and principled thinking. A separate essay disagrees, arguing hiring is overcomplicated: ask a candidate to write a function, run live FizzBuzz, and have them deploy a service to a public server, then hire them. That author dismisses culture-fit interviews as unmeasurable, citing a past job whose psychological screening still hired two people later convicted of murder, one serving life without parole. For senior candidates he suggests filtering for 10-plus years of experience and discussing their field. ## Content Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, put it bluntly on X: "The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal." He pulled it from his hiring loops this month. His logic is that quizzing someone on a small React challenge now makes about as much sense as quizzing them on assembly, because Claude beats people at both. Small coding challenges were always a weak predictor, he says, just a useful one. Not anymore. The part that's getting repeated is his "spicy, optimistic take": this is an opening for juniors. Newer engineers are "flying past" more tenured ones, in his telling, because execution is cheap now. His evidence is Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, two relatively new engineers who built a Claude Code interface prototype over a weekend. It shipped publicly about eight days later. ## What he looks for instead Rieseberg now scans résumés and portfolios "for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking." His advice to juniors is to pick an idea with business impact over backlog work, build a working prototype instead of writing a PRD, and commit to one good idea rather than cramming in ten. @Hesamation called it a "MUST READ for anyone confused about how to get hired in the new era." Addy Osmani summed it up as "Execution isn't expensive anymore." Inside a company, the signal is picking an idea that moves the business and prototyping it. Outside, it's a portfolio of small prototypes that show your judgment. ## The counter-voice A separate blog post, "Can they write a function?", argues the opposite. Hiring should be simple: have the candidate write a function, run a live FizzBuzz, and deploy a service from localhost to a public server. The author calls culture-fit interviews arbitrary and unmeasurable. His cautionary tale is a fancy screening process that still hired two employees later convicted of murder, one now serving life without parole. His diagnosis of why hiring is hard is that companies chase "next Google" candidates at undergrad prices. The two pieces agree on one thing: the traditional loop doesn't predict much. They split on the fix. One says stop testing code and look at taste. The other says test the basics and skip the vibes. ## The backdrop This isn't happening in a vacuum. Google is expanding pilots of interviews where candidates can use Gemini, and Anthropic has said Claude writes 80% of its own code. When the company building the tool says the tool beats the candidate, the interview question gets awkward fast. ## Questions this post answers ### why did Anthropic remove the coding interview from its hiring process An Anthropic team member, Felix Rieseberg, removed the coding interview from his hiring loops because he found it no longer provides signal on candidate ability. Instead, an Anthropic hiring manager now looks at resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy, and principled thinking, which Rieseberg sees as potentially opening a path for junior engineers. _Weighing how to hire engineers without coding rounds is a live debate developers follow on daily.dev._ ### what is a simple alternative to a long technical interview loop One proposed approach is to ask the candidate to write a function, run a live FizzBuzz test, and have them deploy a service from localhost to a public server, then hire them if they succeed. The author behind this approach argues culture-fit and taste-based interviews are arbitrary and unmeasurable, pointing to a past job where psychological screening still hired two people later convicted of murder. _Developers designing leaner hiring processes compare these interview formats on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 134 comments across hackernews, x (as of 2026-10-28). **TL;DR:** The thread largely agrees execution is now cheap thanks to AI agents, so the debate shifts to what should replace coding interviews: most favor testing taste, judgment, and idea-picking, while some worry this just advantages people with resources or context and doesn't address how to actually assess it. Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers: The discussion drifts far from the post's actual advice, with most engagement going into a side debate about work-life balance, relationships, and luck, while a smaller but substantive thread pushes back on whether 'business impact over backlog' is sound or safe advice for juniors specifically. **Sentiment:** 25% positive · 49% mixed · 26% skeptical **The case for** - Agents have automated the typing/execution part of coding interviews, so testing that no longer makes sense. - Some see the shift as positive, arguing cross-domain, fast-moving generalists now have an edge and can learn quickly from AI-assisted trial and error. - Interviewing for taste, judgment, and which ideas to pursue or cut is seen as more relevant now. - A few agree coding interviews need to evolve and suggest AI-assisted mock reviews or spec-to-code exercises as better signal than leetcode. - Pairing newer engineers (agent-savvy) with tenured ones (business context) is suggested as a practical hybrid. **The pushback** - It's unclear how to actually detect taste or judgment from a prototype versus a lucky prompt result. - Many argue pushing business-impact thinking onto junior engineers is misplaced responsibility that belongs to management, not new hires. - Tenure still carries institutional memory of why past ideas failed, which hungry engineers might lack. - Several call the 'build a prototype on your own weekend' advice a way to offload company risk and unpaid labor onto employees. - Most companies still filter resumes by years of experience, so 'hunger beats tenure' may not generalize beyond Anthropic. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Engagement splits between a long tangent on work-life balance and relationships, and a more direct critique of whether the post's advice is appropriate or fair to ask of junior engineers. - x (mixed): People broadly accept that AI has devalued raw coding ability but disagree on what a replacement interview should actually measure. **Hottest debate:** Whether hunger/taste can be meaningfully evaluated in a short interview or portfolio review, versus tenure's harder-to-fake institutional judgment. **Open questions** - What concretely distinguishes a prototype built with genuine taste from one that's just a lucky AI output? - What replaces leetcode-style interviews in a normalized, fair way once AI can solve them? - How do you test for debugging/maintaining AI-generated systems at production scale rather than just shipping a weekend prototype? - How should junior engineers balance pursuing business-impact ideas against the risk of going outside their scope or being dismissed due to lack of context? - Will hiring practices outside well-resourced AI labs actually shift away from resume/tenure filtering? **Highlights** > "work on the weekend for free" aka move the risk (of wasted resources) to the employee. Excellent advice. How about fostering a working culture were employees get a chance of trying out new things during office hours? Especially since AI is rising productivity so much. > — [\_ink\_ on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270066) > @addyosmani Anyone can ship a prototype now, the agent does most of it. The skill worth interviewing for is spotting where it quietly went wrong. That's harder to fake than a portfolio > — [od\_chenko on x](https://x.com/od_chenko/status/2115491993488920601) > @addyosmani Cheap execution also makes bad ideas cheap to ship. Tenure often carries the memory of why something was tried and quietly dropped. I'd want that context in the room before a hungry engineer scales an idea. > — [matcaniglia on x](https://x.com/matcaniglia/status/2115486546338156948) > @addyosmani Execution got cheap, reviewing it didn't. Picking the right idea matters, but someone still has to catch what the agents got wrong. > — [lotar\_vk on x](https://x.com/lotar_vk/status/2115486009374773536) > @addyosmani The coding interview isn't dead. The skill it tests changed. We used to screen for who writes the best code. Now the signal is who understands how systems work, and how they can tie that to real business goals. > — [ivarconr on x](https://x.com/ivarconr/status/2115484576340648357) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266719) · 78 points · 87 comments - [x](https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2115480412151762979) · 0 points · 47 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code](https://daily.dev/posts/how-we-hire-engineers-when-ai-writes-our-code-cihmh6jms) · Tech Lead Digest · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Software engineer interviews for the age of AI](https://daily.dev/posts/software-engineer-interviews-for-the-age-of-ai-xyeahihbb) · swizec.com · 23 upvotes · 2 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic), [#interview](https://daily.dev/tags/interview) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-killed-the-coding-interview-others-say-just-write-a-function-gqimpmeex) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Anthropic killed the coding interview; others say just write a function","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-killed-the-coding-interview-others-say-just-write-a-function-gqimpmeex","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-killed-the-coding-interview-others-say-just-write-a-function-gqimpmeex"},"datePublished":"2026-10-28T00:20:24.393Z","dateModified":"2026-10-28T18:43:44.733Z","description":"An Anthropic engineer says the coding interview no longer works and has dropped it from his hiring loops. 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