The day before yesterday I got a technical assignment from a company I was interviewing with to build a Next.js app. Normally I would build it myself, but that day it just felt so tedious, so I gave Claude Code a try. To my surprise, with little to no guidance (probably cuz it was React), it built the app and it even looked very similar to mock-ups the company gave. I changed some things here and there and submitted the task. The whole thing was done in about half an hour. Yesterday they emailed me to schedule the next interview. I'm hooked.
We still do take-homes. You just design them assuming people are going to use LLMs. They're going to do that on the job anyways, so why tie a hand behind their back?
LLMs have also allowed us to significantly expand the scope of what we ask candidates to look at. Previously, we were constrained by time budgets (the candidate's, not ours) to a relatively small project, from which we had to read tea leaves; minor variations, objective but still small-bore, were determinative of how candidates ranked. Now we can drop a pretty ambitious project, which creates a lot of variation and room to demonstrate approach.
