Ask HN: How do you assess developers' AI-assisted coding skills in interviews?

[breckenedge]

Do you want to hire a developer with 5+ years of LLM experience? Or 3+ years of Claude experience?

Hire learners, or hire people who teach people (evaluate new tools, write guides, conduct training, mentor, etc.).

[Blue_Cosma]

Excellent point. How do you evaluate a developer’s ability to learn and integrate new tools (like AI assistants) into their workflow?

[eevmanu]

I think the approach to evaluate how the candidate use the tool, prompt quality, prompt optimization techniques, how to provide the right amount of context (context engineering), how de-pollutes the context, etc., is a good path (on top of generating a working proof of concept for the problem tackled in the interview process, of course).

Basically focus on the thinking strategy (with or without the AI enhanced tools) is a good way to go.

[Blue_Cosma]

AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) are now part of most developers’ daily workflow, they speed up prototyping, planning, implementation but also change how we think and debug.

I’m curious how you assess developers’ ability to leverage these tools efficiently during the recruiting process. Any tips to share? Any return on experience?

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Answering with the assumption this is for interviews; we ask them to build a simple component of our app within 1 hour, using any resources they like. We judge them based on their communication (breaking down the problem), code quality, and final result.

[Blue_Cosma]

This is indeed during interviews (question updated) Thanks! I assume the 1-hour coding session is done live. From your experience, do candidates seem comfortable using AI tools as naturally as they would on their own? Do you also pay attention to how they interact with these tools — for example, prompting, reviewing, or correcting suggestions?

[hotbit9]

Let them use whatever they need. The result is the most important because that's how they will end up doing their work. Do not restrict anything.

[geekodour]

the fact that these tools enable a developer to do all these things are an attribute of the tool and not the user imo. so i guess just look out for people who and learn quickly and ramp fast, nice to work with etc etc.

[Awesomedonut]

Let them use the tool live and observe the use