AI coding assistants in coding interviews set you up for failure

Relying on AI coding assistants in coding interviews is like relying on a parrot that heard a software engineer ramble on for some time

tl;dr: if you are considering to use an AI coding assistant in your next interview, consider it for the purpose of writing faster not for the purpose of solving the challenge for you.

I have done lots and lots of interviews with candidates ranging from junior candidates (sometimes even right at the start of their career) to expert level. I have seen nowadays one pattern emerge. Every time they were using an AI coding assistant, they started to fail the interview.

The reason for that is simple, the AI coding assistant was confusing them. They did not understand fully what it was outputting, their input to it was wrong, the solution therefore was not solutioning (and I was screaming inside my head).

I have seen only one person that has used it in a sensible way, where their input showed, they understood the problem they set out to solve, the output sometimes was not exactly what they wanted but they understood the output and then corrected it. That was the one and only case where I could say, the AI assistant helped them speed up the overall code generation process.

Every other time it either left the candidates completely confused as to why their AI assistant generated solution did not work or they did not even notice and said it is working while it clearly did not. This shows you that in an coding interview it is not just about coding but about understanding a problem, asking questions and problem solving.

Only use AI coding assistants if you know how to use them, if you feel safe enough to evaluate their output and if you understand the problem in the first place.