Help. Preparing for an AI-assisted coding interview. How did you approach yours? How to succeed in the interview.

[u/Key_Horse_8632]

I have an AI-assisted technical screen coming up. I have been told, it is a small repo, and a couple of tasks that build on each other.

They say they're evaluating how I use AI, how I break down the problem, and how I communicate while working. Interview is time boxed for 1 hour.

If you've done one of these, either as the candidate or the interviewer:

• What separated strong candidates from weak ones?
• How did you split time between prompting the AI and reading or verifying its output?
• Any mistakes to avoid?

Thx.

[u/JustDADE]

Recently I’ve had an interview for agentic software engineer position for a company with zero-coding policy.

Overall, they were interested in my initial setup, what skills am I using for my personal setup and what setup I have for a team. What models am I using and what for (planning, coding, task runners, etc). If you aren’t using anything you can prolly go to skills.sh and check what’s popular. How am I approaching new feature or a bug fixing, ponytail, openspec, grillme, etc.

Knowledge always was and still is what separates strong from weak candidates. When you prepare a spec or going through bug fixing they will see how you think. Do you question decisions of the AI and trying to fully understand the implementation, do you see the potential problematic places straight away or trying to offload all that to AI and so on.

My live interview was based on homework assignment, so I’ve already had specs for all the features I’ve created and could expand relatively fast on the changes that were requested during the interview, I’ve had all the guardrails that I’ve needed so while implementation was in progress I could reduce the awkward silence and explain what I’m expecting to happen.

In the end of the day the important part is the talking and showing that you understand what’s happening with the AI and code itself.

Good luck

[u/Key_Horse_8632 → u/JustDADE]

Thank you. I customized the Anthropic feature-dev skill by adding new sub-agents.

I got Claude to rewrite my brain-dump.

• I'll treat the interviewer as a co-worker and think of them as an equal instead of someone judging me, so I won't second-guess myself too much.
• Time will be my biggest enemy. I need to balance brevity with including my co-worker and making sure we are both heard. I'll need to come up with better strategies and better planning for that.
• Writing out my prompts to the AI will be the slowest part, so I'll create a prompt template I can reuse, copy, paste and fill in the details.

My updated interview framework:

1. Spend a few minutes understanding the problem.
2. Restate the ask. Restate the ask back to my co-worker. Speak aloud about the initial layer and systems design I want to build, and that I will split it into phases with skeleton code to start. For example, build the API endpoints and tests first, then move to the next layer.
3. Kick off. I'll start by mentioning the use cases I see, which endpoints to build, the HTTP methods (PUT vs. POST), and the response codes. If an in-memory DB is required, I'll mention the data structure I'll use and say I will ask the AI to build tests too. At the very least, this shows I know a few things and am thinking about what I want built.
4. Ask for feedback. To avoid wasting time, I'll ask what they think of my use cases. They can add use cases or push back on ideas for v0, and correct me if I'm wrong. I'll say aloud that I'm assuming they are good with the rest of the design (to save time) and will proceed unless they see an issue.
5. Ask the AI to build the plan. I'll include the use cases to help build the tests and tell the AI to consider surfacing use cases I hadn't thought of (a good way to cover flaws/gaps in my thinking). I'll also ask what questions it has for me to fill any gaps.
6. Review the plan. I'll ask the AI to build the plan for review, then fix what I see wrong. Because a plan can be a lot to parse with limited time, I may ask the AI to create user stories, including requests and responses, as the source of truth. I'll tell my co-worker that, due to time, I'm trusting the user stories to represent the rest of the plan.
7. Build one endpoint first. I'll tell the AI to build only one endpoint, then review it, update the plan, fix issues, and test the endpoint.
8. Build the rest. Then I'll ask it to build the others. I'll review the code and the test cases, ask the AI to add any that are missing, and run the tests myself.
9. Wrap up v0. I'll tell the reviewer I'm satisfied with the v0 skeleton and, in the interest of time, move on to the next layer.

[u/Key_Horse_8632 → u/JustDADE]

Many thanks. I rewrote my initial response in earlier reply.