the more i looked into this, the more i realized this isn’t really hypothetical anymore
companies like bloomberg and goldman are already experimenting with AI-assisted interviews where you’re dropped into a codebase and expected to actually figure things out.
and tbh for actual engineers, that part isn’t new. that’s basically the job. you get a repo, you get a ticket, you find the relevant code, make the change, test it, etc.
what i’m more curious about is people who’ve mostly learned through AI/vibe coding and are now trying to prepare for interviews like this.
because prompting something into existence is very different from being dropped into a repo you’ve never seen before and having to know where to look, what to ask, whether the AI is wrong, and how to verify the change.
that’s mostly what i’ve been building Groundwork around — unfamiliar repo, ticket, IDE, terminal, tests and an AI assistant.
i’m mainly trying to figure out whether this would actually be useful for interview prep though.
if you were preparing for this kind of interview, would you use something like that?
and what part would you actually want to practice?
ok i re-read. i see. i still never gave code based interviews. i found that people who could go i to theor projects with depth had a solid understanding.
yeah, i get that. but i think what i’m more interested in is problem navigation.
once someone joins a company, they’re not always going to be working on things they’ve already seen before or can talk about from past experience. they’ll get dropped into unfamiliar systems, weird bugs, new constraints, and have to figure out what matters.
so part of the value to me is seeing how someone behaves when they don’t already know the terrain, where they look first, what assumptions they make, how they narrow things down, and how quickly they build enough understanding to make a good decision.
i think that’s probably part of why leetcode-style interviews survived this long too. for all their flaws, they give you a problem the candidate hasn’t necessarily seen (sometimes) in that exact form and let you watch how they navigate it.