AI coding tools enter tech interviews
"Rather than fighting this reality and trying to police AI usage (which is increasingly difficult), we made the decision to embrace transparency and work with this new reality. We want to see how well candidates collaborate with AI to solve problems," Canva said in a blog post.
This approach isn't a shortcut; it's a smarter, fairer way to see how candidates perform in a real-world coding environment. As AI tools become part of everyday development, using them in interviews could soon be the new normal—making hiring faster, fairer, and more relevant.
Canva said that engineering work involves far more code reading and comprehension than writing code from scratch. "With AI tools generating initial code, a critical skill is the ability to read, understand, and improve that code.
Our traditional interviews gave us no signal about these essential capabilities."
Mastercard, for instance, on its careers page, said that for certain roles, candidates may be invited to use AI as part of the technical assessment process, and the interviewee will be given clear guidelines for the use of the appropriate AI tools.
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Viral Shah, co-creator of Julia Computing, said, "If the engineers are going to use AI tools for their jobs anyway, why not use them in the interview? The process of software development is transitioning from developers writing first principles programs to instead giving high-level clear directions to the AI agents and then doing design and code review. Indian firms, whether services or products, will need to hire for those skills.
I believe this transition will be existential for some of the firms, and firms that adapt to the new realities will scale to new heights."
Abhimanyu Saxena, founder of upskilling platform Scaler, said for senior roles such as an architect and senior developer, the company is allowing prospective candidates to use AI tools like ChatGPT in technical interviews. "Prompting is treated as a skill—asking the right questions to AI is as valuable as coding itself.
But it doesn't end there. Top candidates go beyond just generating code; they validate its security, completeness, and quality, anticipate issues, and iterate using AI to improve outcomes.
This applies not only to engineers but also to roles like product managers who might generate and refine product documents with AI."
Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, said the real question is whether you trust the tool enough to let it bring out your best in an interview.
"For me, it can be reminiscent of when I was first allowed to use a calculator in a classroom setting. It helped me speed up some tasks and get to the questions that required more analytical thinking—but at the end of the day, I still needed to understand math. It is the same scenario with these tools being leveraged in an interview; some may think candidates are 'cheating', but the reality is they still need to understand coding principles.
The human being is still responsible for vetting and understanding that the work is accurate and worth putting his or her name on it."
He also said the answer is somewhere in between—companies are likely going to require developers to know both how to code fundamentally and how to code faster and more efficiently with GenAI tools, as they improve in their efficacy. "The interview processes will likely reflect this dichotomy," Chandrasekar said.
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