the more i looked into this, the more i realized this isn't really hypothetical anymore
companies like bloomberg and goldman are already experimenting with AI-assisted interviews where you're dropped into a codebase and expected to actually figure things out.
and tbh for actual engineers, that part isn't new. that's basically the job. you get a repo, you get a ticket, you find the relevant code, make the change, test it, etc.
what i'm more curious about is people who've mostly learned through AI/vibe coding and are now trying to prepare for interviews like this.
because prompting something into existence is very different from being dropped into a repo you've never seen before and having to know where to look, what to ask, whether the AI is wrong, and how to verify the change.
that's mostly what i've been building Groundwork around — unfamiliar repo, ticket, IDE, terminal, tests and an AI assistant.
i'm mainly trying to figure out whether this would actually be useful for interview prep though.
if you were preparing for this kind of interview, would you use something like that?
and what part would you actually want to practice?
That's the easy part of the job. The hard part is getting the business to make a god damned decision without three months of fucking around and executives asking if we can "do 'it' with AI", long before anyone has established what "it" is.
and the non-technical execs are usually the worst for it 😭 to them AI is basically a magic button, so somehow you’re expected to ship 100x faster on something nobody has even properly defined yet.
but that’s more the chaos you learn to survive once you actually have the job.
i’m more focused on the bit before that, what people are actually going to be tested on to get through the interview in the first place, especially with the market being this rough.