I had a job interview at Canva where they had an "AI coding round". They wanted to see how I used AI in my workflow.
Because I was using DeepSeek flash, the interviewer was confused at how fast I was getting edits - he'd only used Claude and was used to it thinking for 40 minutes to update a function.
We were building a frontend application and I was able to do that whole guided prompt/review loop. I finished the task with no defects (high quality code) and way ahead of time.
I could tell the questions he asked were prepped for vibe coding with slow frontier models, like "how do you review the code to ensure it is safe to commit" - "make small/reviewable edits and read the code the LLM emits?".
Despite meeting the criteria of a principal engineer in the other rounds, the feedback on the AI round was that "I didn't delegate enough to the AI and was too hands on" lol.
Because I was using DeepSeek flash, the interviewer was confused at how fast I was getting edits - he'd only used Claude and was used to it thinking for 40 minutes to update a function.
We were building a frontend application and I was able to do that whole guided prompt/review loop. I finished the task with no defects (high quality code) and way ahead of time.
I could tell the questions he asked were prepped for vibe coding with slow frontier models, like "how do you review the code to ensure it is safe to commit" - "make small/reviewable edits and read the code the LLM emits?".
Despite meeting the criteria of a principal engineer in the other rounds, the feedback on the AI round was that "I didn't delegate enough to the AI and was too hands on" lol.