I'm hiring engineers in 2026.

I've never felt more behind as a programmer. The frontier agents now produce coherent, end-to-end work without needing to be corrected. The interview has to change to match.

— Andrej Karpathy, founding member OpenAI — AI Ascent 2026

TL;DR · 30 seconds

The shift

The shape of an engineer changed at the end of 2025. Frontier coding agents now ship coherent end-to-end work. The scarce skill is no longer typing code — it's taste, spec writing, oversight, and judgement under jagged AI behaviour.

Do this

Replace the puzzle interview with a six-step modern loop: scoped end-to-end project, agent-direction round, real toolchain, adversarial pair-against-AI, judgement debrief. Hire fewer people; expect multiples per head.

Stop this

Stop running LeetCode-style screens and 45-minute live-coding rounds. They measure work an agent now does for free. They actively screen out the candidates you most need.

Common starting points

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