u/Bellleq

Had a final round yesterday for a mid-level backend role. The coding portion was what you'd expect, system design-ish problem, nothing crazy. But the interviewer straight up told me I could use whatever AI tools I wanted during the session.

I figured it was a trap so I started writing things out manually. He stopped me maybe 5 minutes in and said something like "I want to see how you work with these tools, not without them." So I pulled up an assistant, started prompting, and he was way more interested in how I validated the output and caught the bugs than whether I could write the function from scratch.

The whole thing took about 40 minutes and honestly it felt like a completely different skill than what I've been practicing. I spent the last 3 months grinding problems every night and none of that mattered. What mattered was whether I could spot when the AI gave me garbage and fix it quickly.

I don't even know how to feel about it. Part of me thinks this makes way more sense for actual day to day work. The other part of me is like, cool, so all those hours were just wasted then.

Curious if anyone else has run into this. Starting to wonder if the whole leetcode grind meta is about to become irrelevant or if this was just one weird company.

Friend of mine works at a mid-size SaaS company. They started rolling out AI agents for code review, testing, even writing basic features about 6 months ago. First it was "just helping the team move faster." Then the layoffs started quietly.

They lost 8 people. The ones left are basically babysitting AI output all day, fixing hallucinated code and rewriting tests that look right but test nothing. Management calls them "AI-augmented engineers" now which apparently means doing 3x the work for the same pay while pretending to be grateful.

The wild part is nobody pushed back because they were all scared of being next. So they just kept saying yeah this is great, so much more productive. Meanwhile the codebase is slowly turning into spaghetti that nobody fully understands because half of it was generated by something that doesnt actually understand what it wrote.

I keep hearing stories like this from people I know and honestly starting to wonder if we're all just watching this happen in slow motion. Thinking about picking up woodworking as a backup plan, at least a table cant be hallucinated.