shaneoh

My settings are pretty standard:

% claude Claude Code v2.1.111 Opus 4.7 (1M context) with xhigh effort · Claude Max ~/... Welcome to Opus 4.7 xhigh! · /effort to tune speed vs. intelligence

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. 50 meters is shorter than most parking lots — you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than walking there. Plus, driving to a car wash you're about to use defeats the purpose if traffic or weather dirties it en route.

Reminds me of those Skannerz toys from when I was a kid! It was a device you could scan any barcode with and you would get some monster from it and could collect and battle with them. Kind of like Pokemon with barcodes.

I'm seeing this pattern pop up more and more all over the place now. It's pervasive throughout Reddit too for example: pick a sub in the area that you built your app in, pose some problem, and then have another account also controlled by you present the solution that you built. All the writing styles in these posts are similar too; it's all likely written by AI, including the post we're commenting on.

I think he could have just been a bit lazy.

Yup, we told them exactly that.

See my answer to the other comment on this question. We figured there were some good use cases for AI in an interview that weren't just copy/pasting code, it's not about guessing intentions. It seemed most helpful to potentially unstick candidates from specific parts of the problem if they were drawing a blank under pressure, basically just an easier "You can look it up on Google" in a way that would burn less time for them. However we quickly found it was just easier for us to unstick them ourselves.

> If AI is an issue for you then just ban it.

Yes, that was the conclusion I just said we rapidly came to.

Ironically this is exactly how I am too. Even at work, if I'm talking through a problem on a presentation or with my boss, I'm much more scatterbrained, and I'll try to dodge those kinds of calls with "Just give me 30 minutes and I'll figure it out." which always goes better for me.

That said, now we're just talking about take home challenges for interviews and you always hear complaints about those too. And shorter, async timed challenges (something like "Here's a few hours to solve this problem, I'll check back in later") are now going to be way more difficult to judge since AI is now ubiquitous.

So I really don't think there's any perfect methodology out there right now. The best I can come up with is to get the candidate in front of you and talk through problems with them. The best barometer I found so far was to set up a small collection of files making up a tiny app and then have candidates debug it with me.

One example would be looking up syntax and common functions. In a high-pressure situation it's much tougher to bumble around Google and Stack Overflow, so this would be a way for solving for "I totally know how to do this thing but it's just not coming to mind at this moment" which is fair. Usually we the interviews can obviously just tell them ourselves though, but that's what I was going for.

But yeah, the point is that once I applied it in practice it did quickly become confusing, so now I know from experience not to use it.

I think the other suggestions in this thread about how to use it are good ones, but they would present their own meta challenges for an interview too. Just about finding whatever balance works for you I guess.

I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job.

It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried asking ChatGPT the problem straight up, even though I clarified up front "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."

After just the initial batch of candidates it became clear it was muddying things too much, so I simply forbade using it for the rest of the candidates, and those interviews went much smoother.

If HN is not representative of the customer base for a paid search engine, then what is?

More curious about your story of starting your own company on a near-whim! I've been grinding out trying to do the same over a year or so without any traction at all and I'm finding myself almost back at Square 1 without any more solid ideas.

How did you get your French back up to snuff?

That's cool! I do all of those things as well, minus the uni classes and open-source. But for someone who has no interest in travel, then learning foreign languages would be a waste of time. I personally consider writing open-source software a waste of my time because it would be taking away from my closed-source side project ventures.

You can totally min/max your entire life and only do things for self-improvement, but then to what end? What do you expect to derive out of the continuing education classes that is going to be significantly valuable to your life/career?

I think it's important to note that many people are actually quite satisfied with their position in life, a lot of us are making a lot of money engaging in interesting work, so at a certain point doing things for the sake of minimizing opportunity cost comes with diminishing returns as you've already made the most of the opportunities you've already had. The whole point of working hard is to reach some stage of life where you can actually reap the rewards and have the time and resources to enjoy yourself however you please without worrying about it.

What are those hobbies?