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Comment by adithyassekhar

13 hours ago

Are they just looking for AI skills? If so that's terrifying.

I think most are looking for both.

AI/LLM knowledge without programming knowledge can make a mess.

Programming knowledge without AI/LLM knowledge can also make a mess.

  • > AI/LLM knowledge without programming knowledge can make a mess.

    That makes sense.

    > Programming knowledge without AI/LLM knowledge can also make a mess.

    How? I'd imagine that most typically means continuing to program by hand. But even someone like that would probably know enough to not mindlessly let an LLM agent go to town.

    • > How? I'd imagine that most typically means continuing to program by hand.

      I think the use of LLMs is assumed by that statement. The point is that even experienced programmers can get poor results if they're not aware of the tech's limitations and best-practices. It doesn't mean you get poor results by default.

      There is a lot of hype around the tech right now; plenty of it overblown, but a lot of it also perfectly warranted. It's not going to make you "ten times more productive" outside of maybe laying the very first building blocks on a green field; the infamous first 80% that only take 20% of the time anyway. But it does allow you to spend a lot more time designing and drafting, and a lot less time actually implementing, which, if you were spec-driven to begin with, has always been little more than a formality in the first place.

      For me, the actual mental work never happened while writing code; it happened well in advance. My workflow hasn't changed that much; I'm just not the one who writes the code anymore, but I'm still very much the one who designs it.

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    • "How?" <- It shows a lack of curiosity?

      "probably know enough" <- that's exactly the point of the question, is the candidate clueless about AI/LLM.

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Probably, I think hand coding is going the way of the dodo and the ox cart.

  • Sorry but focusing on the hand coding part misses the whole picture and would derail the conversation. Comparisons like that are often dishonest.

    Hiring someone who writes Rust with Claude but never written anything with it in their lives, never faced the edge cases, never took the wrong decisions feels naive to me. At the end of the day it's still a next token generator, an impressive one. It can hold context but not relate with anything outside that context. Someone needs to take accountability.

The usual LeetCode-ish tasks, often system design, but then deep AI usage. "I use Copilot" isn't going to fly at all, as far as I understand.

  • Are you allowed to leverage AI to answer the leetcode questions? Otherwise, it seems it is the interviewers who are behind the times!