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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.

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I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.

I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.

Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.

I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.

But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.

It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.

To me it seems the important skills are good communication, attention to detail and some taste. All were important before AI.

Yes. Believing otherwise must require quite some amount of insecurity and lack of self-confidence.

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