The new rules are pretty clear to me. Senior people are now judged less on recall and more on judgement, framing and whether they can spot when an answer looks wrong, even if a machine produced it. That shift is overdue. What lands well here is the distinction between not memorising syntax and not understanding what’s actually happening underneath. Those are very different things, and conflating them is where teams get into trouble.

Worth noting that Stack Overflow’s 2024 developer survey found over 75 percent of professionals now use AI coding tools at least weekly, but debugging and system design remain the hardest skills to replace.

Interviewing for thinking rather than theatre feels like a healthier bar for everyone involved. How far you think hiring processes will realistically move this year, or whether most firms will cling to the old tests a bit longer?