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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"

#141

Post by Narciss »

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 hear this argument all the time, and I think “this is exactly how people who coded in assembly back in the day thought about those using higher level programming languages.”

It is a paradigm shift, yes. And you will know less about the implementation at times, yes. But will you care when you can deploy things twice, three times, five times as fast as the person not using AI? No. And also, when you want to learn more about a specific bit of the AI written code, you can simply delve deep into it by asking the AI questions.

The AI right now may not be perfect, so yes you still need to know how to code. But in 5 years from now? Chances are you will go in your favorite app builder, state what you want, tweak what you get and you will get the product that you want, with maybe one dev making sure every once in a while that you’re not messing things up - maybe. So will new devs need to know high level programming languages? Possibly, but maybe not.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

Daub wrote: post #135

Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by ljm »

shipp02 wrote: post #34
jon-wood wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. At least in theory that’s not what homework is. Homework should be exercises to allow practicing whatever technique you’re trying to learn, because most people learn best by repeatedly doing a thing rather than reading a few chapters of a book. By applying an LLM to the problem you’re just practicing how to u…

What if you use it to get unstuck from a problem? Then come back and learn more about what you got stuck on. That seems like responsible use.

In the context of homework, how likely is someone still in school, who probably considers homework to be an annoying chore, going to do this?

I can't really see an optimistic long-term result from that, similar to giving kids an iPad at a young age to get them out of your hair: shockingly poor literacy, difficulty with problem solving or critical thinking, exacerbating the problems with poor attention span that 'content creators' who target kids capitalise on, etc.

I'm not really a fan of the concept of homework in general but I don't think that swapping brain power with an OpenAI subscription is the way to go there.

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

#144

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #23

If I want to assess a candidates performance when they can't use AI then I think I'd sit in a room with them and talk to them. If I ask people not to use AI on a task where using AI is advantageous and undetectable then I'm going to discriminate against honest people.

I think this gets to the core of the issue: interviews should be conducted by people who deeply understand the role and should involve a discussion, not a quiz.

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

#145

Post by xnorswap »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat".

I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable".

I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI.

I guess that puts me at a serious disadvantage in the job market, but I am okay with that, I've always been okay with that. 20 years ago my cohort were doing what I thought were selfish things to get ahead, and I'm fine with not doing those things and ending up on a different lesser trajectory.

But that doesn't mean I won't also air my dissatisfaction with just how much people seem to justify selfishness, or don't even regard it as selfish to ignore this request.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/03/12/age-of-selfishness-sick-singl...

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

#146

Post by antihipocrat »

0x1062 wrote: post #53
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…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

Using the wrong tool for the job required isn't lazy but it may be dangerous, inefficient and ultimately more expensive.

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

#148

Post by Applejinx »

madeofpalk wrote: post #54
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…

I've seen applicants use AI to answer questions during the 'behavioral' Q&A-style interviews. Those applicants are 'cheating', and it defeats the whole purpose as we want to understand the candidate and their experience, not what LLMs will regurgitate. Thankfully it's usually pretty easy to spot this so it's basically an immediate rejection.

You could reasonably argue that they're not cheating, indeed they're being very behaviorally revealing and you do understand everything you need to understand about them.

Too bad for them, but works for you…

I'm imagining a hiring workflow, for a role that is not 'specifically use AI for a thing', in which there is no suggestion that you shouldn't use AI systems for any part of the interview. It's just that it's an auto-fail, and if someone doesn't bother to hide it it's 'thanks for your time, bye!'.

And if they work to hide it, you know they're dishonest, also an auto-fail.

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

#149

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

lukan wrote: post #110
miningape wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, not everyone can really use AI to deliver something that works "That works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and really depends more on the technical skills of the person. Because, shocker, AI doesn't magically make you good and isn't good itself. Anyone can prompt an AI for answers, it takes skill and knowledge to use those answers in something that works. By prompting AI for simple questions you don't tr…

"Put simply, using AI makes you worse at your job - precisely when you need to be better." I don't follow. Usually jobs require deliver working things. The more efficient the worker knows his tools(like AI), the more he will deliver -> the better he is at his job. If he cannot deliver reliable working things, because he does not understand the LLM output, then he fails at delivering.

You cannot just reduce programming to "deliver working things", though. For some tasks, sure, "working" is all that matters. For many tasks, though, efficiency, maintainability, and other factors are important.

You also need to take into account how to judge if something is "working" or not — that's not necessarily a trivial task.

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

#150

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

I love it when the "contrarian view" is absolutely not the contrarian view :)
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