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It's insane how many of these new "AI" companies don't let you use AI or even your own IDE for coding interviews. And most questions from such companies are LC type problems so they know any AI tool can one shot it.

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I discourage it but I let them use it and then give them a specific problem that I know your average Claude 4 or GPT 5 will just not get it right.

Actually people perform worse in an interview using AI because they spend time trying to understand what the tool is proposing and then time to figure out why that doesn’t work.

My experience has been quite different. With Cursor/Claude code, I've ended up writing full fledge solutions (running cli/web servers with loggers and unit tests for each functionality). We're talking crawlers, cab booking service like uber, search engines with seed data. All within the hour.

Why is that insane? Seems logical to me.

Definitely not insane. Ironic is the correct term. The field is evolving, a lot of these companies talk about replacing outdated practices using AI. Asking software engineers to not use their own tools to solve problems falls under the same bucket.

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