Claude can pass the coding interview. So how do you work out who to hire? One Anthropic engineering manager has stopped using traditional coding interviews for his team, arguing that they no longer tell him enough about candidates. He’s looking instead for prototypes that demonstrate taste, empathy and judgement.
In this week’s Now Shipping, Mike Belsito explores what this means for product people. If AI can complete your take-home exercise or product case study, is your hiring process still measuring the skills you need?
Mike examines how Anthropic and Canva are adapting their assessments, why a polished prototype isn’t enough, and how reviewing flawed AI-generated work could reveal more about a candidate’s thinking.
In this episode:
— Why Felix Rieseberg dropped coding interviews for his Anthropic team.
— How improving AI models forced another Anthropic team to repeatedly redesign its hiring test.
— Why judging AI-generated work matters alongside creating it.
— What prototypes can reveal about candidates, and what they can hide.
— How an “audit interview” could work for product managers.
Why clear scoring criteria matter when assessing subjective qualities such as taste and judgement.
Try this with your team: run one of your existing interview exercises through an AI tool. Would you advance a candidate who submitted that answer? If so, consider what else you need to observe to assess their thinking.
Featured reading:
- Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers, Felix Rieseberg
- Designing AI-resistant technical evaluations, Anthropic
- How employment is changing at Anthropic
- Yes, you can use AI in our interviews. In fact, we insist, Canva
- State of Tech Hiring 2026, CoderPad
