Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

Post by yodsanklai » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

game_the0ry wrote: post #243

> 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. This is an interesting way to recruit. Much better than standard 2 leetcode medium/hard questions in 45 mins.

Post by yodsanklai » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

game_the0ry wrote: post #277

legel wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could use any number of LLMs on real-world problems. Why are we still interviewing like its 1999?

Old habits die hard. And engineers are pretty lazy when it comes to interviews, so just throwing the same leetcode problem into coder pad in every interview makes interviews easier for the person doing the interview.

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #279

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem a bit of a strange challenge - a bit reminiscent of high school math problems where understanding the question was as much part of it as actually solving the problem when you understood it. Since the focus of the challenge appears(?) intended to be optimization, not reverse engineering, it's a bit odd that they don't give a clear statement of what the kernel is meant to be computing. Perhaps the challeng…

This isn't "reverse engineering" it's merely "being able to read fairly simple code you didn't write". A much simpler version of the kernel is provided at the end of problem.py as reference_kernel2. If you can't make sense of such a small codebase or don't immediately recognize the algorithm that's being used (I'm guilty of the latter) then you presumably aren't someone that they want to hire.

Post by tcoff91 » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #281

game_the0ry wrote: post #243

> 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. This is an interesting way to recruit. Much better than standard 2 leetcode medium/hard questions in 45 mins.

It would take something like one week full time to work on this. It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job and apply to several other companies. I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time for an uncertain result. It's true that being ready for leetcode takes practice, but at least it's standard so you can re-use the skills to other interviews. Optimizing some generated code is c…

Post by matt_d » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

owlbite wrote: post #247

mike_hearn wrote: post #143

Earlier 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…

I think calling VLIW "an adandoned design" is somewhat of an exaggeration, such architectures are pretty common for embedded audio processing.