THE CRUNCH
An Anthropic engineering manager has declared the traditional coding interview dead, arguing that AI assistants have made small coding challenges pointless. Felix Rieseberg explained in a blog post that he has stopped using them for his team. "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," he wrote. He added that his most impactful builders succeed regardless of how they perform on such tests, and said he does not expect the coding interview to return.
Rieseberg is not entirely alone in his thinking. Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google, responded on social media that she would be interested in interviewing candidates on how they use coding agents, saying that itself reveals more about their coding skills. Google has also reportedly been reevaluating its coding interviews in recent months.
The wider industry, however, appears more cautious. Nicole Bachaud, a labour economist at ZipRecruiter, said tech companies are not widely abandoning skills assessments yet. In fact, the company's October 2026 survey of 1,500 employers found the Information sector the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent requiring formal tests on initial applications.
Bachaud suggests the change is more about what is being tested than whether. Some 70 percent of Information sector employers have switched to proctored or in-person assessments to deter AI-assisted cheating, and 61.5 percent report that critical thinking is a primary skill missing from today's candidate pool. "Ultimately, tech companies aren't necessarily testing less, but the way they are testing is changing," she said.
Rieseberg himself admits he has not settled on a replacement. He says he is scanning resumes and portfolios for small prototypes showing "taste, empathy, and principled thinking", and has asked for better ideas on how to interview for people who build well with AI.