What a Coding Interview Measures When the Candidate Has an Agent
The coding interview was built to isolate a single variable. Put a person in a room, give them a problem, take away their references, and watch whether they can turn the problem into working code by themselves. Everything about the format — the whiteboard, the blank editor, the prohibition on looking things up — exists to strip away collaborators and tools so you measure one isolated skill: can this person, alone, write correct code under pressure.
That skill is no longer the one the job exercises. Day-to-day engineering in 2026 is a collaboration between an engineer and an agent. The engineer decides what to build, the agent drafts most of the code, and the engineer's real work is reviewing, correcting, and deciding when the agent is confidently wrong. The interview measures solo code production. The job rewards directing a tireless, fast, occasionally hallucinating collaborator. The proxy and the target have come apart, and most hiring pipelines haven't noticed.
This is not a complaint about cheating, though cheating is the symptom everyone fixates on. It's a measurement problem. When you can no longer observe the variable your test was designed to isolate, the test stops producing signal — and a test that produces no signal while everyone still trusts it is worse than no test at all.
