It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
It’s kind of an interesting problem.
Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
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Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#22It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
I’ve been sent the Anthropic interview assignments a few times. I’m not a developer so I don’t bother. At least at the time they didn’t seem to have technical but not-dev screenings. Maybe they do now.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#23It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
Why is writing code to execute a program using the fewest instructions possible on a virtual machine a waste of time?
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#24Having recently learned more about SIMD, PTX and optimization techniques, this is a nice little challenge to learn even more.
As a take home assignment though I would have failed as I would have probably taken 2 hours to just sketch out ideas and more on my tablet while reading the code before even changing it.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#25The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#26It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time." I did this in the 4-hour window, and it was a lot of fun. Much better than many other take-home assignments.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#27I suspect this was released by Anthropic as a DDOS attack on other AI companies. I prompted 'how do we solve this challenge?' into gemini cli in a cloned repo and it's been running non-stop for 20 minutes :)
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think that means you failed :(
+1 being cryptic and poorly specified is part of the assignment just like real code in fact, it's _still_ better documented an self contained than most of the problems you'd usually encounter in the wild. pulling on a thread to end up with a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished is like 90% of the job very often.
It's definitely cleaner than what you will see in the real world. Research-quality repositories written in partial Chinese with key dependencies missing are common.
IMO the assignment('s purpose) could be improved by making the code significantly worse. Then you're testing the important stuff (dealing with ambiguity) that the AI can't do so well. Probably the reason they didn't do that is because it would make evaluation harder + more costly.
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#29“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.”
Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
#30It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time." I did this in the 4-hour window, and it was a lot of fun. Much better than many other take-home assignments.
4 hours continuous or no? I can't imagine finding 4 hours of straight focus.