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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#121

Post by coldtea »

sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

>In life there is no cheating

Huh?

>You're just optimizing for the wrong thing. AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent.

Isn't that the definition of cheating? Presenting a false level of talent you don't possess?

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#122

Post by blensor »

hollowturtle wrote: post #46
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I can even feel it in my own coding. I've been coding almost my entire life all the way back to C64 Basic and ever since I am relying on Copilot for most of my regular work I can feel my non AI assisted coding skills get rusty.

That's a scary thing

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#124

Post by reshlo »

logicchains wrote: post #96
sifex wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and…

>We don’t want to work with AI, we are going to pay the person for the persons time If your interview problems are representative of the work that you actually do, and an AI can do it as well as a qualified candidate, then that means that eventually you'll be out-competed by a competitor that does want to work with AI, because it's much cheaper to hire an AI. If an AI could do great at your interview problems but sti…

Interview problems are never representative of the work that software developers do.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#125

Post by [deleted] »

psychoslave wrote: post #58
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

>In life there is no cheating. You're just optimizing for the wrong thing. AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. No, the homework is a proxy for measuring what the homework provider is interested to evaluate (hopefully). Talent is a vague word, and what we can consider talent worth nurturing might be consider worthless from some other perspective.…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#126

Post by Shinchy »

sho_hn wrote: post #85
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

'"every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works'

I totally agree with this and I really like that way of wording it.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#128

Post by llm_trw »

djtango wrote: post #36
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Consider the case where there is a non Native English speaker and they use AI to misrepresent the standard of written English communication. Assume their command of English is insufficient to get the job ultimately. They've just wasted their own time and the company's time in that situation. I imagine Anthropic is not short of applicants...

>Hey Claude, translate this to Swahili from English. Ok, now translate my response from Swahili to English. Thanks.

We're close to the point where using a human -> stt -> llm -> tts -> human pipeline you can do real time high quality bi directional spoken translation on a desktop.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#129

Post by jusomg »

jusomg wrote: post #119

I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?). I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never wa…

You could also learn a lot from what someone is asking an AI assistant.

Someone asking: "solve this problem" vs "what is the difference between array and dict" vs "what is the time complexity of a hashmap add operation", etc.

They give you different nuances on what the candidate knows and how it is approaching the understanding of the problem and its solution.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#130

Post by Eisenstein »

sho_hn wrote: post #85
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?
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