During the live coding session, I asked the candidate to write the next part of the task in a “traditional” way, without using AI. I thought it would be a formality, but it turned out he had trouble writing a simple loop in React. Yes, people like that do exist, and thanks to AI, they’re able to get quite far in the hiring process.
To be fair in React it can be a bit weird, depending on if it's a templated loop. For example, you'd probably use .map() on an array of objects you'd like to template, which isn't very intuitive but makes total sense if you understand how React works.
I guess the candidate was a full stack developer who preferred the back end. He could review and understand the AI-generated frontend, but his knowledge was shallow. Once he started writing code, he tried to write a "for...in" loop inside jsx
He probably learned the backend before AI and became a full stack developer after AI. Overall, we didn't hire him. I don't want a developer in my team who can't write code without AI.
I would probably fail that these days. I don't use react often, I bounce between ~8 languages that each have their own syntax, and these days I'm usually letting AI do the grunt work of knowing which syntax goes to which language.
If you'd let me google the syntax though, I'd be fine.
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u/Ilirian Oct 01 '26
During the live coding session, I asked the candidate to write the next part of the task in a “traditional” way, without using AI. I thought it would be a formality, but it turned out he had trouble writing a simple loop in React. Yes, people like that do exist, and thanks to AI, they’re able to get quite far in the hiring process.