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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"

#371

Post by skydhash »

Kye wrote: post #288
skydhash wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly by reading a good book to get the fundamentals down, then taking on a project to apply the knowledge and supplement the gap with online ressource. There are good books and nice open source projects out there. You can get far with these by just studying them with determination. Later you can go on the theoretical and philosophical part of the field.

How do you know what a good book is? I've seen recommendations in fields I'm knowledgeable about that were hot garbage. Those were recommendations by reputed people for reputed authors. I don't know how a beginner is supposed to start without trying a few and learning some bad habits.

If you're a beginner, almost any book by a reputable publisher is good. The controversial ideas start at the upper intermediary or advanced level. No beginner knows enough to argue about clean code or the gang of four book.

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

#372

Post by bitwize »

Kye wrote: post #356
sbarre wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're starting with paper? Years back I worked somewhere where we had to PDF documents to e-fax them to a supplier. We eventually found out that on their end it was just being received digitally and auto-converted to PDF. It was never made paper.. So we asked if we could just email the PDF instead of paying for this fax service they wanted. They said no.

There was a comment here on HN, I think, that explained why enterprises spend so much money on garbage software. It turned out that the garbage software was a huge improvement on what they did before, so it was still a savings in time and money and easier than a total overhaul. I wonder what horror of process and machinery the supplier used before the fax->PDF process.

I once worked on a janky, held-together-with-duct-tape-and-bubblegum distributed app written in Microsoft Access. Yes, Microsoft Access for everything, no central server, no Oracle, no Postgres. Data was shared between client and server by HTTP downloads of zipped-up Access .mdb files which got merged into the clients' main database.

The main architect of the app told me, "Before we came along, they wer doing all this with Excel spreadsheets. This is a vast improvement!"

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

#373

Post by pydry »

lolinder wrote: post #339
latexr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, what you are is ignoring the context. This request comes from a company building, promoting, and selling the very thing they are asking you not to use. Yes, asking you not to use AI is indeed a polite request. It is one you should respect. “The zeitgeist” has as much peo…

Why does the company that's asking change the analysis here? Shouldn't they know better than anyone the limitations of their product? Are you implying that Anthropic specifically pushes for their models to be used inappropriately as long as they're not the victims of that inappropriate use? Because I haven't seen that at all with Anthropic, they've been consistently the most subdued and reserved AI company out there,…

Id say that if a candidate can demonstrably 5x their performance with LLMs then I'd be keen to hire them.

By banning LLM usage I think Anthropic is just indirectly admitting that their assessments cant distinguish lameduck LLM reliance and genuine increases in productivity.

This is certainly their prerogative but it's still a pretty bad look - like banning calculators in a math exam.

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

#374

Post by kelseyfrog »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #365
gosub100 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine a world where most kids were raised with this bullshit and it's normal to them.

Most kids were raised while inundated with advertising but don't talk like a TV commercial.

Respectfully, I disagree.

Like and subscribe.

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

#375

Post by sifex »

63stack wrote: post #257
sifex wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and…

I see this line of "I need to assess your thinking, not the AI's" thinking so often from people who claim they are interviewing, but they never recognize the elephant in the room for some reason. If people can AI their way into the position you are advertising, then at least one of the following two things have to be true: 1) the job you are advertising can be _literally_ solved by AI 2) you are not tailoring your in…

Right now there’s a lot of engineering that falls outside SWE — think datacenter architecture or integrations, or security operations, or designing automotive assemblies. There are also dozens of components of a job that require context windows measured in the _years_ of experience — knowing what will work at scale and what won’t, client interfacing, communicating decisions down inside organisations through to customer support networks about how they are required to operate.

When we’re hiring for my role, Security Operations, I can’t have someone googling or asking AI what to do during an cyber security incident, but they can certainly use AI as much as they want when writing automations.

I reject candidates at all stages for all sorts of reasons, but more and more candidates believe the job can be done with AI. If we wanted AI, we will probably go wholesale and not include the person asking for the job to do the typing for us.

We’re not crying due to AI, we’re crying over the dozens of lost hours of interviews we’re having to conduct where it’s business critical that people know their stuff — engineering positions with consequences (banks, infrastructure, automotive). There isn’t space for “well I didn’t write the code”.

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

#376

Post by sifex »

logicchains wrote: post #96
sifex wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and…

>We don’t want to work with AI, we are going to pay the person for the persons time If your interview problems are representative of the work that you actually do, and an AI can do it as well as a qualified candidate, then that means that eventually you'll be out-competed by a competitor that does want to work with AI, because it's much cheaper to hire an AI. If an AI could do great at your interview problems but sti…

It’s more like “can you design something with the JWT flow” and the candidates scramble to learn what JWT is in the interview to impress us, instead of asking us to remind them on the specifics on JWT. They then get it wrong, and waste the interviewers time.

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

#377

Post by sshine »

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…

> sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use AI and not be caught? Is it cheating? Does it matter if it's cheating?"

First off: Since your opinion is the popular one, "sshine reply below". ;-)

Those are not questions I ask.

Using AI is never cheating, you're optimizing for the wrong thing. Cheating occurs in games.

You can use AI, but if your writing ability is so far from what's expected, AI will just make that obvious (sludge). If it's not far off, and you use it as one might use spellcheck or Grammarly, it's like wearing fake heels at an audition: To get noticed. Just don't come on stilts.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

Eisenstein wrote: post #130
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by sshine »

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 assume you disagree with there being such a thing as "responsible AI use", because besides that, I completely agree with everything you write, including my own experience of "spot wrong answers, but feel becoming lazy".

So I suppose you think that becoming lazy is always irresponsible?

It seems to me, then, that either the Amish are right, or there is a gray zone.

Being a CS teacher, my use of "responsible AI use" probably comes from a place of need: If I can say there is responsible AI use, I can pull the brake maybe a little bit for learners. It seems like LLMs in all their versatility are a great disservice to students. I'm not convinced it's entirely bad, but it is overwhelmingly bad for weak learners.

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