351–360 of 394 posts
I got to 1364 cycles for now, semi-manually: Using design space exploration organized via backlog.md project, and then recombination from that. 20 agents in parallel. Asked to generate drawio for the winner so I can grok it more easily, then I gave feedback. Edit: 1121 cycles
It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.
If you look at it as a puzzle game then it's not any different than the time you use to play other games.
This assumes that the candidate has a lot of time for playing other games.
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It definitely bears all the LLM hallmarks we've come to know. emdash, the "this isn't X. it's Y" structure - and then, to cap it off, a single pithy sentence to end it.
Also bears all the hallmarks of an ordinary post (by someone fairly educated) on the Internet. This would make sense, because LLMs were trained on lots of ordinary posts on the Internet, plus a fair number of textbooks and scientific papers.
I know real people do sometimes use it, but it's a smell.
When I pointed out this contradiction via email, they ignored me completely and instead silently patched the README to retroactively enforce the rule.
It’s not just a bad test; it’s a massive red flag for their engineering culture. They wasted candidates' time on a "guess the hidden artificial constraint" game rather than evaluating real optimization skills.
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I don't do take home assignments, but when I did, I would offer to do it at my hourly rate, even if it was just an hour. It's time I would otherwise spend making money. Anyone worth working with respected that and I landed several clients who forwent the assignment altogether. It's chump change in the grand scheme of things, and often a formality. Does help that I have a very public web presence and portfolio, though…
I have foregone our take home for exceptional candidates, but let me ask you, do you also demand compensation for in person or zoom call 1-1 interviews? Surely thats the same time of your life.
Being told "here do this arbitrary thing that will take 4 hours of your time and maybe we'll look at it, and then if we even bother to do that, maybe we'll respond" is different than an interview where both parties invest their time face-to-face.
I just withdrew my application over this test. It forces an engineering anti-pattern: requiring runtime calculation for static data (effectively banning O(1) pre-computation). When I pointed out this contradiction via email, they ignored me completely and instead silently patched the README to retroactively enforce the rule. It’s not just a bad test; it’s a massive red flag for their engineering culture. They wasted…
They want to see how you handle low level optimizations, not get tripped over some question semantics.
I just withdrew my application over this test. It forces an engineering anti-pattern: requiring runtime calculation for static data (effectively banning O(1) pre-computation). When I pointed out this contradiction via email, they ignored me completely and instead silently patched the README to retroactively enforce the rule. It’s not just a bad test; it’s a massive red flag for their engineering culture. They wasted…
This isn't the gotcha moment you think it is. Storing the result on disk is some stupid "erm achkually" type solution that goes against the spirit of the optimization problem. They want to see how you handle low level optimizations, not get tripped over some question semantics.
I didn't simply "skip" the problem. I implemented a compiler that solves the problem entirely at build time, resulting in O(0) runtime execution.
Here is the actual "Theorem" I implemented in my solution. If a test penalizes this approach because it "goes against the spirit," then the test is fundamentally testing for inefficiency.
""" Theorem 1 (Null Execution): Let P: M → M be a program with postcondition φ(M). If ∃M' s.t. φ(M') ∧ M ≅ M', then T(P) = 0.
Complexity: O(n) compile-time, O(0) runtime """
If they wanted to test runtime loop optimizations, they should have made the inputs dynamic.
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Presumably that is only one of two purposes, with the other being to test your ability to efficiently read, understand, and edit low level code that you didn't write. I imagine you'd regularly run into raw PTX if you worked for them in the relevant capacity. And perhaps a third purpose is to use the simulator to test your ability to reason about hardware that you are only just getting familiar with.
I would assume that anyone optimizing kernels at Anthropic has full documentation and specs for what they are working on, as well as a personal butler attending to their every need. This is big money work - every 1% performance improvement must translate to millions of cost savings. Maybe they specified the challenge in this half-assed way to deliberately test those sorts of skills (even if irrelevant to the job), or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
(yes, yes, not every human will try this test)