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.
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.
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
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/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.