The rapidly-progressing abilities of AI are also changing how employers assess candidates in job interviews.
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition — the AI startup behind Devin, the autonomous software engineering agent — has argued that trying to ban AI from interviews is not just impractical, it’s the wrong question altogether. His company has always allowed candidates to use AI freely during its hiring process, and Wu believes the rest of the industry is now catching up to that thinking.
“One or two years ago, I think a lot of people had this mentality in terms of how you interview: ‘How do we make sure that people aren’t using AI while we’re interviewing them?’ I think that has totally flipped — and honestly, I think that was wrong,” Wu said.
The reason, he argues, comes down to what interviews are actually for. “If you’re asking the question of how we evaluate people on exactly the thing that AI can already do, that seems like the wrong question.”
For Cognition, the answer has always been to lean into AI use rather than guard against it. “Our interview process has always been: you can use as much AI as you want to use. We’re going to give you a few hours — just build your whole own product surface. A lot of these are projects that, frankly, if you were trying to do this by hand, you would not be able to get done. So you kind of have to use AI for this.”
But giving candidates free rein with AI tools isn’t about making things easier — it’s about isolating what actually matters. “What we actually want to test is, in addition to how familiar you are with these tools: what do you think is the right thing to build? How do you make these product decisions? How do you make these trade-offs? How do you decide or collect information about what you should be doing?”
The logic is hard to argue with. As AI handles more of the execution, the premium shifts toward judgment — knowing what to build, why, and for whom. These are precisely the things AI cannot answer on a candidate’s behalf.
Wu’s view reflects a broader reckoning happening across tech. Salesforce announced it would hire no new software engineers in 2025 due to AI productivity gains, while Y Combinator’s Tom Blomfield has said that software engineering jobs as we know them won’t exist in five to ten years. OpenAI has launched a dedicated jobs platform to certify AI fluency — a sign that proficiency with these tools is becoming a baseline credential, not a differentiator. If the ability to write code is no longer what separates good candidates from great ones, then interview processes that test for it are, as Wu puts it, asking the wrong question. What companies increasingly need to hire for is the layer above execution: taste, judgment, and the ability to figure out what’s worth building in the first place.