If your live coding problem is simple enough to be solved by an AI tool without human intervention, your process is broken.
There are two blatantly obvious points here:
- ChatGPT, Copilot, and similar tools are part of the modern workflow. Banning them during interviews makes no sense if candidates will use them on the job anyway.
- Problems that AI tools can solve unaided aren’t effective filters. They won’t tell you much about a candidate’s thinking, design skills, or ability to deal with ambiguity.
And here’s a less obvious—but more interesting—point:
If the problem is complex enough, AI becomes a support tool, not a solver.
Watching how candidates collaborate with AI tells you far more about their mindset and process than watching them coding a Fibonacci generator by hand.