I interviewed Claude Code as if I were interviewing a candidate for a software engineering position. Why? Just for fun. My experience was interesting

My Interview with Claude Code | mattlangston

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2025-08-03 22:30:03

I interviewed Claude Code as if I were interviewing a candidate for a software engineering position. Why? Just for fun. My experience was interesting to me, so I decided to write it up for you.

Claude Code is not autonomous and Anthropic makes no claim to the contrary. It cannot replace an experienced human software engineer, at least not yet. On the contrary, Claude Code requires an experienced human software engineer to provide ground-truth feedback in order for it to consistently produce high quality results. Claude Code is a human accelerant, not a human replacement.

In the remainder of this article I will sometimes use the names Claude Code and Claude interchangeably, but I am always referring to Claude Code.

I've used this interview question in the past because it tests for several required software engineering skills: conceptualizing and reasoning about a real-world abstraction and realizing it in code; problem solving methodology; data structure selection; how much coaching is required to iterate not only to a solution that produces a correct result, but a solution that demonstrates skill and experience so that I can make a placement recommendation.

I've used this interview question as a warm-up starter question that helps me determine the outlines of a candidate's qualifications and experience that steers how I use my time with them. I usually get ~50 minutes to interview a candidate. Experienced engineers typically knock this interview question out in 10-15 minutes. Less experienced engineers struggle with it quite a bit and require my help and guidance.

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