Anthropic stops coding interviews because its AI does them better

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, has stopped giving job candidates coding interviews. His reason is simple: Claude, the company's AI, now does them better than people do. He explained this in a blog post on October 27, along with advice for young engineers who fear AI will take their jobs.

Why the test no longer works

Rieseberg says small coding challenges used to be a weak but useful sign of how someone would perform on his teams. He says that is no longer true. Giving a candidate a small React task, a common web coding exercise, now makes about as much sense as quizzing them on assembly, an old low-level programming style. Claude is better at both. He also notes that his most impactful builders succeed no matter how they score on such tests.

His advice for newcomers

Rieseberg argues that newer engineers can have more impact than before, because AI has made that impact depend less on years of experience. He calls it "hunger beats tenure". His advice, which he says applies to anyone without status or power, comes down to a few steps:

• Focus on business impact, not your task backlog. Use your manager's manager's goals as a guide.
• Pick one radical idea that could sharply improve the odds of hitting those goals.
• Build a working prototype over a weekend instead of writing documents and lobbying for help.
• Use the outsider's view. New hires often understand users better and do not know why something is supposedly impossible.

His example comes from inside Anthropic. Staff were used to Claude Code as a command-line tool, meaning one where you type instructions as text. Two relatively new engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working graphical version over one weekend. The first public version shipped about eight days later.

The job market behind the advice

The worry is real. AI was the most cited reason for US job cuts in September, behind 21% of announced layoffs, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Tech accounted for 29% of cuts. Microsoft has offered buyouts to 60,000 employees, and Oracle has cut 21,000 jobs. Goldman Sachs estimates AI could displace up to 9% of US workers, roughly 15 million people.

Anthropic is not immune. It said last week that entry-level technical hires fell from nearly 30% of its hires to 9% since March 2025. Its IPO filing shows Claude produced more than 90% of contributions to its codebase in September. Not everyone sees doom, though. Some economists say firms are blaming AI for cuts they would have made anyway, and US unemployment is still around 4.1%.

What is still unsolved

Rieseberg admits he has not yet figured out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now, he scans resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy and principled thinking. If anyone has a better method, he wrote, he would love to hear it.