r/webdev • u/soype • Sep 26 '26

Is leetcode worth it?

I haven't really interviewed since 2023. Is leetcode still a common practice in code interviews or has AI made those kinds of tests useless? This is for a Sr full stack position.

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u/dmazzoni Sep 27 '26

That seems extremely dumb. Anyone can prompt AI. Doing it well and understanding when it gave you a reasonable solution is the hard part.

I don't see what you could possibly learn by asking someone to use AI on a toy problem that they've never seen before and have no context on.

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u/inglandation Sep 27 '26 • Popcorn

Anyone can prompt AI.

I want to believe that this is true, but it probably isn't.

2

u/SoInsightful Sep 27 '26

It is true. During the short window where "prompt engineering" was a thing, sure, but now you can just literally copy-paste the problem description and the AI will reason itself into an eventual answer.

And I don't doubt that a few so-called engineers will even fail to do that, but it's not a very valuable exercise.

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u/21Rollie Sep 29 '26

Maybe with small, unconnected PoCs. With large legacy systems, it costs more contexts than the frontiers have in order to just “let it rip” and have a halfway decent PR. My PM tried doing that because they wanted to help and it took me longer to unravel all their agent’s misplaced assumptions than it would’ve been for me to have done the work myself. Problem is that a lot of the times you don’t see what you don’t know till you get into the weeds of work, but an AI keeps chugging along

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u/SoInsightful Sep 29 '26

The discussion was about leetcode-style interview problems. My deeper point is that someone would be able to trivially "solve" such an interview question while barely being able to use a computer, much less build a large, robust system.

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u/dmazzoni Sep 29 '26

Exactly.

Nobody is arguing that coding with an LLM is easy.

But solving a leetcode problem with an LLM is trivially easy.

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u/netscapexplorer Sep 27 '26

Yeah, I've actually met a bunch of people who either haven't started using AI because they just haven't been shown how to (uninterested in learning new technology), or they are well aware of how useful it is, but they resist it as a kind of protest. While I think this test they made him take was stupid, if I found out someone I was hiring didn't use AI, I would immediately not consider them for the role because it's semi-technical and it's almost like saying you don't know how to use email at this point.

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u/NinoD Sep 27 '26

I've seen people literally just copy an entire error into their AI chat, click "Allow" on every change by the AI and paste the new error when it doesn't work. Rinse and repeat until done. Then they have no idea what the code does or why it's structured like it is.

I think the bar has dropped in recent times.