I've spent the last decade watching this arms race between interviewers and candidates. Last month I hired a senior dev who couldn't implement a basic database migration when we brought him on but aced our interview problems. Turned out he'd been using tools like this.
The problem isn't the tools - they're inevitable. The problem is that our industry clings to this bizarre ritual where we test for skills that are completely orthogonal to the actual job.
My current team scrapped the algorithmic questions entirely. We now do pair programming on a small feature in our actual codebase, with full access to Google/docs/AI. The only restriction is we watch how they work. This approach has dramatically improved our hit rate on good hires.
What I care about is: Can they reason through a problem? Do they ask good clarifying questions? Can they navigate unfamiliar code? Do they know when to use tools vs when to think?
These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were.
The problem isn't the tools - they're inevitable. The problem is that our industry clings to this bizarre ritual where we test for skills that are completely orthogonal to the actual job.
My current team scrapped the algorithmic questions entirely. We now do pair programming on a small feature in our actual codebase, with full access to Google/docs/AI. The only restriction is we watch how they work. This approach has dramatically improved our hit rate on good hires.
What I care about is: Can they reason through a problem? Do they ask good clarifying questions? Can they navigate unfamiliar code? Do they know when to use tools vs when to think?
These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were.