Are coding interviews dead? What AI changed
Coding interviews are not disappearing, but AI is changing their format. Here is what current hiring data says and how developers should prepare.
You don't need to learn to code anymore. Coding interviews are dead.
That's what your social media feed keeps telling you.
But here's what the data says: technical interviews in the US have nearly doubled since 2023, and they are becoming more challenging than ever, not easier.
So what's actually going on?
Because getting this wrong costs you either way. Either you keep grinding LeetCode-style interviews and prep for an interview that doesn't exist anymore, or you misread the industry and walk away from a career that is still very much hiring.
So let's ignore what people are saying, and look at what companies actually do when their own money is on the line. Because the facts tell a completely different story from what you are hearing.
Maybe I just got unlucky
A few months ago, I interviewed with 11 different companies. Every single one that got far enough into the process went technical. These were a mix of coding challenges and system design questions related to whatever niche the company worked in.
Two of these required me to do the classic solved sudoku problem.
Now, maybe I just got unlucky and picked the 11 most old-school companies in the industry, but that's not what the data says.
Remember when I said technical interviews had nearly doubled? That data comes from CoderPad, the platform where a huge share of companies conduct their interviews. Their State of Tech Hiring report has technical assessments up 48% globally since mid-2023. And 43% of companies still run classic algorithmic assessments. The rest didn't drop the technical bar. They moved it: system design, pair programming and real-world debugging.
The AI labs test the hardest
Okay, but maybe that's just the slow companies, right? Enterprises stuck in 2019, still interviewing like the AI wave never happened. That would be a fair objection, except the strictest interviews in tech right now belong to the people building the AI tools.
OpenAI's most commonly reported interview question is implementing an LRU cache, from scratch, and live, as you explain your reasoning through the process. And an LRU cache is just a hash map plus a linked list, the exact "obsolete" fundamentals your feed keeps telling you are irrelevant.
Anthropic publishes an official policy for candidates, and for live interviews it says: "no AI assistance unless we indicate otherwise. We're curious to see how you think through problems in real time."
And Meta went the other way entirely. They built a round where you're encouraged to use AI. And the accounts coming out of it say that round is harder than the classic one.
The companies closest to the models, the people who know exactly what AI can and can't do, are the ones testing the hardest. Why do you think that is?
Surprise: it was never about the code
The people who bought "AI killed the coding interview" have a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of technical interviews, or what the software developer job actually requires. The thinking goes: AI writes the code now, so we're out of the loop. Like that was our job all along.
The interview was never about writing code. I'm a little shocked this needs to be said out loud, but here we are. It wasn't about syntax either. In fact, lots of interviewers let you choose the language you work in for the interview, because that never mattered to begin with.
What they're grading is the judgment behind your solution. Can you think through a problem? Why this decision over another? Tradeoffs, alternatives, where it breaks at scale, how scalable your solution is.
A large chunk of the interviews I've taken were system design: patterns, working through larger ideas. Most of them involved no code at all. Just a scratch pad and a situation to walk through.
And on the other side of the table, the best candidates I interviewed were the ones I had great conversations with, talking through solutions and ideas. The way they reasoned told me they knew their stuff, and that they could be someone who adds new ideas to the team.
There's a funny thing people have been reporting about in Meta's AI-assisted round.
Candidates keep claiming that the models they use are dumber during the interview than the day before when they were practicing. Same model and prompts are suddenly writing buggy code and no longer pointing out mistakes.
Now it's not confirmed by Meta that they purposely make the model do worse somehow, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's a great way to watch where candidates catch obvious issues and where they glaze over them.
So imagine thinking AI ended all of this and that nobody would ever ask you to explain what you built. Exposing someone has never been easier. A few follow-up questions, and it's over.
So did anything actually change?
Now, I'm not going to tell you nothing changed. Things are changing, just not in the direction you were promised.
Developers have been saying the interview process was broken since long before AI. Too abstract, too much memorization, nothing like the actual job. But for years, nothing moved.
According to the CoderPad report, companies surveyed are adopting real-world scenario simulations, which signals some progress toward assessing what matters. These exercises typically include:
- Multi-file codebases (not single-function puzzles)
- Realistic debugging challenges
- Working with existing code (not greenfield only)
- Integration with actual frameworks and tools
Less "invert this binary tree," more "here's our code, make it better."
That's much closer to the actual day-to-day engineering work, and it still leans on the same deep-rooted concepts you needed before.
This is the first change in years I'd call progress when it comes to the interview process.
But here's where the industry is still split: nobody agrees on how much AI usage should be allowed. Roughly a third of companies still ban it entirely. Half allow it. The rest decide case-by-case.
And where it's allowed, I've seen companies ask for your prompt history, grill you deeply on the take-home project they gave you, then have you extend it live on a call.
So no matter where a company lands, partial, full, or somewhere in between, there is no version of this where knowing less is the winning move.
Where did the bar go?
The pattern of interviews has been evolving over the past 70 years.
Think of it as a stack. At the bottom, the mechanical stuff: typing out working code. In the middle, implementation: picking an approach and making it work. At the top, judgment: tradeoffs, catching what's wrong, defending the decision. Producing working code used to prove the layers above it. You couldn't get something real working without understanding underneath.
Every era of tooling deletes the bottom of the stack and pushes the test upward. Compilers deleted assembly. Frameworks deleted boilerplate and nobody interviews you on memory management for a React job. AI is deleting yet another layer, which is producing the actual code, so the test is moving up a layer.
As AI adoption grows, we're going to see more companies adjust their interviews to include it, and focus less on producing code without it. But just because we may write less of the code by hand doesn't mean the bar dropped. The bar moved up the stack.
If you want to work up that stack, these courses move from JavaScript fundamentals through modern implementation to the software-design judgment you need to explain and defend.
Check out our related courses
Time to upset both sides
And this is the part that actually makes me upset about the rhetoric we're seeing online today.
The "just prompt harder" crowd
AI bros, you're telling beginners they don't need to learn to code and that knowledge is obsolete. Just prompt harder.
That's like telling someone they can skip flight school because planes have autopilot. Autopilot is great. It's also not the reason anyone gets to sit in that seat. Nobody is hiring vibe coders.
And the market is telling you this with data: 74% of developers say they're struggling to land a job while 78% of tech leaders say they can't find qualified people. Both true at once. The jobs exist, but the qualified people are getting harder to find.
We're about to see the biggest demand for developers, probably ever, and yet the public messaging is manufacturing the shortage of qualified developers.
The "real engineers don't touch AI" crowd
I'm gonna say something that will upset a few of you. Outside of very specific cases, I wouldn't hire a developer who refuses to leverage AI tooling. At this point it's just getting irresponsible not to, and the pushback against it, which I can understand, is becoming just as much of a problem.
I remember back in 2017 when I hired my first developer. This guy was good, but refused to move out of his PHP stack and would always complain about the framework my project was using. His claim was that a "real" developer should be able to write their own web server from scratch, and that frameworks like Django and React were for noobs.
I think we're past the "AI is just a tool" phase, and need to adapt. You're not only gonna be graded on your ability, you're gonna be graded on your AI fluency as well.
I don't make the rules, that's just where the market is right now.
The price of not knowing just went up
So to close this out, no, coding interviews aren't dead. There are more of them than ever, and they're testing the same thing they always tested: whether you know what you're doing. AI didn't change that. It just raised the price of not knowing. So keep your fundamentals, get good with the tools, and understand everything you build, because the developers doing both aren't scared right now. They're thriving.
