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Anthropic manager says the 'coding interview is dead' — here's his advice for junior developers
Utku Ucrak/Anadolu via Getty Images
- An Anthropic manager says Claude has made traditional coding interviews a poor hiring signal.
- His advice to juniors: target business problems and build a focused prototype over a weekend.
- Google and Amazon are also reshaping engineering work and hiring around AI fluency and impact.
Out with the coding test, in with Claude.
That's the shift Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic engineering manager, says he has made to his team's hiring process, arguing that AI has rendered traditional coding interviews a poor measure of who will succeed at work.
"The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic," Rieseberg wrote in a Tuesday post on X. "I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal."
Rieseberg elaborated in a blog post, writing that there's "no point" in giving candidates coding challenges or asking them about programming languages like assembly.
"Claude is now better at both," he said of the company's own AI model.
Coding challenges were once a "weak but useful" predictor of success, Rieseberg said, but the most impactful builders on his teams are not necessarily the people who excel at such tests.
"I'm seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer," he wrote. "Hunger beats tenure."
AI is writing most of the code at Anthropic, and the shift tracks with changes underway at other Big Tech companies. Business Insider's Hugh Langley reported last week that Google is expanding pilots for software-engineering interviews that allow candidates to use Gemini to assess their AI fluency and prompting skills.
Amazon, meanwhile, told engineers on Tuesday to prioritize customer and business outcomes over raw AI usage. The company calls the moment the era of the "Renaissance Developer," in which human judgment and machine intelligence combine to build products faster.
How junior engineers can stand out
The rise of AI coding tools has fueled fears that junior developer roles will become harder to get, as AI takes on work like debugging and building simple features — tasks that once helped early-career engineers learn the ropes.
In his blog, Rieseberg shared advice for junior engineers — or, more broadly, people without organizational status or power. Rather than just clearing backlog tickets, he said they should identify the business problems their company is trying to solve.
Then, they should come up with a bold idea that could materially advance those goals and build a working prototype over a weekend. The project should communicate one compelling idea, he said, rather than bury several good ones inside an overly ambitious product.
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
— Felix Rieseberg (@felixrieseberg) October 27, 2026
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: https://t.co/PVvpQCbQtK
Newer engineers should also lean into their outsider perspective. They may be more likely to spot broken user experiences or question ingrained assumptions about what is possible, Rieseberg said.
He pointed to two relatively new Anthropic engineers who built a graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend; the first public version shipped around eight days later.
Rieseberg said he has not yet solved the problem of how to assess candidates who build effectively with AI.
For now, he said he is scanning resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show "taste, empathy, and principled thinking" — qualities that AI researchers and tech leaders are increasingly putting a premium on in the age of AI.
