Is it "write 20 astroturfing but somewhat believable posts about the merits of "AI" and how it is going to replace humans"?
It should be "can you gaslight a CEO into firing 90% of their software engineers?"
Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
151–160 of 394 posts
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original >If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing. Not condescending > If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com w…
But now the meaning is different: you went from a potential interview to a guaranteed one.
No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as
> do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you
If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
/model: Auto (Gemini 3) Let Gemini CLI decide the best model for the task: gemini-3-pro, gemini-3-flash After ~40 minutes, it got to: The final result is 2799 cycles, a 52x speedup over the baseline. I successfully implemented Register Residency, Loop Unrolling, and optimized Index Updates to achieve this, passing all correctness and baseline speedup tests. While I didn't beat the Opus benchmarks due to the complexit…
we've lost the plot. you can't compete with an AI on doing an AI performance benchmark?
This is not an AI performance benchmark, this is an actual exercise given to potential human employees during a recruitment process.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#154[flagged]
Well working under someone who keeps insisting Software engineering is dead sounds like a toxic work environment.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it is a specialized problem. If you've never worked on anything similar previously, it is going to take time. Don't even need to interview for selective billion dollar companies like Anthropic to encounter these types of problems - after college I interviewed for various electronics/hardware companies where you'd get asked to optimize low-level code - which would have looked quite foreign, if you had never actua…
If you ask an EE to debug react state management code without prior exposure they won't do too well either. But on the other hand they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer who can optimize code for a specific architecture would take months.
> EE to debug react state management ... easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer ... would take months
Isn't that mostly because as you go up the abstraction layer, tools and docs to teach yourself the tricks of trade fast are in abundance (let alone a popular layer like React)? Which inturn is likely a function of incentives and opportunities.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#156>so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing. Something comes across really badly here for me. Some weird mix of bragging, mocking, with a hint of aloof. I feel these top end companies like the smell of their own farts and would be an insufferable place to work. This does nothing but reinforce it for some reason.
Remember: It is a company that keep saying how much production code can be written by AI in xx years, but at the same time recruiting new engineers.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 30 years in, and literally don't understand the question.
The question isn't clearly written down anywhere, that's why. Presumably actual candidates would have been given more info over the phone or email. Part of the "challenge" is reverse engineering their Python; unclear if that's intentional. If you look at the top of perf_takehome.py then there is a brief comment saying the challenge is to optimize a kernel. Kernel in GPU land means a program that computes on data in p…
On the one hand, this exercise probably reflects a realistic task. Daily engineering work comprises a lot of reverse engineering and debugging of messy code.
On the other hand, this does not seem very suitable as an isolated assignment. The lack of code base-specific context has a lot of potential for frustration. I wonder what they really tested on the candidates, and whether this was what they wanted to filter for.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question isn't clearly written down anywhere, that's why. Presumably actual candidates would have been given more info over the phone or email. Part of the "challenge" is reverse engineering their Python; unclear if that's intentional. If you look at the top of perf_takehome.py then there is a brief comment saying the challenge is to optimize a kernel. Kernel in GPU land means a program that computes on data in p…
This is nice writeup. Thanks. Another commenter said will've taken them 2h just to sketch out ideas; sans LLMs will've taken me more than 2h just to collect all this info let alone start optimizing it.
It took me about 10 minutes to generate that writeup the old fashioned 100% organic way, because one of the things that's unspecified is whether you're allowed to use AI to help solve it! So I assumed as it's a job interview question you're not allowed, but now I see other comments saying it was allowed. That would let you get much further.
I think I'd be able to make some progress optimizing this program in two hours but probably not much. I'm not a performance engineer but have designed exotic emulated CPU architectures before, so that helps a lot.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they read your code in the actual hiring loop.
My point still stands. I don't know what the LLM is doing so my guess is it's cheating unless there is evidence to the contrary.
I guess your answer to "Try to run Claude Code on your own 'ill-defined' problem" would be "I'm not interested." Correct? I think we can stop here then.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it is a specialized problem. If you've never worked on anything similar previously, it is going to take time. Don't even need to interview for selective billion dollar companies like Anthropic to encounter these types of problems - after college I interviewed for various electronics/hardware companies where you'd get asked to optimize low-level code - which would have looked quite foreign, if you had never actua…
If you ask an EE to debug react state management code without prior exposure they won't do too well either. But on the other hand they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer who can optimize code for a specific architecture would take months.
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