Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?
A hiring manager reports that a majority of developer candidates now rely on AI agents rather than writing code manually. This shift creates uncertainty regarding how to effectively assess fundamental coding and system design skills during interviews. The author seeks advice on whether to maintain traditional technical interview processes or adapt to the new AI-assisted development landscape.
- ▪Approximately 80% of developer candidates interviewed by the author state they primarily direct AI agents instead of writing code themselves.
- ▪The hiring manager feels uncomfortable with this trend and remains concerned about candidates' ability to write code and understand system design.
- ▪The author is questioning the continued relevance of conventional LeetCode and design interviews in the current market.
- ▪The post seeks insights from other professionals on how to evaluate candidates who are fully integrated with AI coding tools.
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| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768826 |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:10:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T18:18:45.994Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T18:18:45.994Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nvW6ogGvmZ4x · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Since the rise of AI coding assistants, about 80% of the dev candidates that I interview tell me that they aren't writing much code themselves anymore - they are directing agents instead. This makes me deeply uncomfortable (although maybe I'm just being old-fashioned). I still want to know that devs on my team can actually write code themselves, and have some idea of what they are doing when it comes to system design. This is increasingly challenging given how rapidly the AI tools are evolving.I'm curious what other folks are seeing in a post-AI hiring landscape and how you are approaching candidates that tell you they are fully agent-pilled when it comes to their development process.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.