Meta is allowing job candidates to use AI assistants during coding interviews, marking a significant shift in how tech companies evaluate engineering talent. The move reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of “vibecoding,” where engineers will increasingly manage AI coding agents rather than write code themselves.
What you should know: Meta is actively testing AI-enabled interviews and recruiting employees for mock sessions to refine the process.
- An internal company post stated: “Meta is developing a new type of coding interview in which candidates have access to an AI assistant. This is more representative of the developer environment that our future employees will work in, and also makes LLM-based cheating less effective.”
- The company is asking existing employees to volunteer for mock AI-enabled interviews to help shape the future of their interview process.
The big picture: This represents a broader Silicon Valley push toward hiring engineers who can effectively collaborate with AI rather than code from scratch.
- Zuckerberg has repeatedly emphasized that AI coding agents will become central to Meta’s engineering work, predicting that “most of the code that’s going towards [AI] efforts is written by AI” within 12 to 18 months.
- The CEO envisions a future where “a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”
Why this matters: Meta’s approach contrasts sharply with other tech companies that still prohibit AI use during interviews.
- Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, specifically bans job applicants from using AI during their interview process.
- Some AI tools have emerged promising to help applicants secretly use AI during coding interviews, highlighting the tension around this issue.
What they’re saying: Zuckerberg outlined his vision for AI-powered engineering during a January podcast with Joe Rogan.
- “I think this year, probably in 2025, we at Meta as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” he said.
- “In the future people are going to be so much more creative, and they’re going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things.”
The controversy: Established software engineers express concerns about the shift toward AI-assisted coding.
- Many worry that the next generation of coders will become AI “prompters” and “vibecoders” rather than traditional software engineers.
- There are fears that these engineers may lack the skills to troubleshoot AI-written code when problems arise.
In plain English: “Vibecoding” refers to a style of programming where engineers give high-level directions to AI tools rather than writing detailed code line-by-line—similar to how a manager might delegate tasks to assistants rather than doing the work themselves.
Company response: A Meta spokesperson confirmed the company’s commitment to integrating AI into both work and hiring processes.
- “We’re obviously focused on using AI to help engineers with their day-to-day work, so it should be no surprise that we’re testing how to provide these tools to applicants during interviews,” the spokesperson told 404 Media.
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