\n AI can now help software engineers write code and documentation; analyze data; learn coding concepts and troubleshoot, among other things. That lets tech companies move much more quickly, some executives say.\n <\/p>\n
\n An OpenAI engineer used AI to implement a system change that would have taken his team a week otherwise, company president Greg Brockman recently said<\/a> during a Sequioa Capital talk. Many internal apps at Google are being \u201cmostly\u201d written with the company\u2019s Antigravity AI coding tool, Varun Mohan, a director at Google DeepMind, told CNN earlier this month.\n <\/p>\n \n Boris Cherny, Anthropic\u2019s head of Claude Code, wrote on X<\/a> in December that \u201c100%\u201d of his contributions to the product over the past 30 days were written by Claude Code.\n <\/p>\n \n Cherny believes AI is shifting the role of a software engineer to focus on high-level decision-making rather than writing code. The title \u201csoftware engineer\u201d might be replaced with a name like \u201cbuilder\u201d that better captures the position, he previously told CNN.\n <\/p>\n \n AI isn\u2019t meant to replace engineers, Google\u2019s Mohan told CNN.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe think developers should spend most of their time trying to figure out what they should build,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the whole question.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Madhu Kurup, vice president of engineering at Indeed, compared AI in software engineering to Google Maps\u2019 role in travel. Google Maps can tell a person which highway exit to use, flag traffic conditions and find coffee shops on a driver\u2019s route, but it doesn\u2019t pick the destination or decide what time to leave.\n <\/p>\n \n However, that Google report last year indicated that 46% of tech workers only \u201csomewhat\u201d trust the quality of AI-generated code, and 31% said AI only \u201cslightly\u201d improved code.\n <\/p>\n \n And layoffs throughout 2025 and 2026 suggest AI is affecting payrolls. AI was the top reason cited by companies for job cuts in April for the second month in a row, the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas<\/a> said this month.\n <\/p>\n \n Companies for years have evaluated potential candidates with regimented tests that<\/a> some say<\/a> have felt like taking the SATs, but for coding. They don\u2019t measure how workers delegate tasks to an agent and use AI to navigate issues, brainstorm or work more efficiently.\n <\/p>\n \n Now, some engineers feel those tests no longer reflect \u201cwhat their job will actually look like,\u201d said Jordan Leonard, cofounder and chief operating officer of Leopard.FYI, a tech hiring network for women and genderqueer engineers.\n <\/p>\n \n In late April, software developer David Barajas said he had been on about five or six job interviews after being approached by recruiters over the past six to eight months. None of them asked to see how he incorporates AI coding tools like Cursor into his work.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe first thing they say is, you\u2019re not supposed to be using any AI tools, no AI assistance, nothing to help you solve this problem,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n Sujata Sridharan, who most recently worked at the fintech firm Bolt and has spent roughly a decade as a software engineer, also said most of the companies she\u2019s recently interviewed with are using the same traditional tests that focus on understanding code rather than working with AI. \u201cThere is that gap, it\u2019s just grown wider (because of AI),\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n Some companies initially prohibited candidates from using AI during tests to prevent cheating. Barajas said he\u2019s even been asked to share his desktop during interviews to prove he\u2019s not using AI. While such concerns are nothing new, worries about cheating have \u201creally ramped up to an unusual level\u201d because of AI, according to Mai.\n <\/p>\n \n And AI\u2019s rapid advancement means role requirements are constantly shifting.\n <\/p>\n \n One company Leopard.FYI works with said the programming language Ruby on Rails was required for an open position, said Leonard. Three weeks later, the company changed its mind because AI can easily translate other languages to Ruby on Rails.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt feels like a moving target on literally a weekly (or) monthly basis,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n Employers are starting to focus more on questions that show how candidates think through issues and weigh trade-offs rather than raw coding capabilities. Those topics traditionally come up in senior-level interviews but are now becoming more common across the board, according to Mai.\n <\/p>\n \n Some startups have experimented with bringing in candidates to work on site for a half a day. And it\u2019s becoming increasingly common for managers to allow applicants to use AI during the testing process, according to Leonard.\n <\/p>\n \n But even those changes don\u2019t fully capture how the job gets done these days. Sridharan, for example, usually collaborates with AI to work through issues, but her experience using it in technical tests usually entails using it as a replacement for hands-on coding.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s still an \u201cunsolved problem,\u201d according to Mai.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of unexpected what candidates are going to run into,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary AI has transformed software engineering so rapidly that traditional coding tests no longer reflect how engineers work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-700110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Some](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/gettyimages-2029003009-20260527175347179.jpg\")
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