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Felix Rieseberg, a hiring manager at Anthropic, says he stopped using traditional coding interviews this month because Claude now outperforms candidates on small React challenges and assembly questions. He says these tests once weakly predicted success but no longer identify the most impactful builders, and that engineers who are newer to the field can surpass more experienced programmers when they use AI effectively. Rieseberg argues that junior engineers, or engineers without organizational status, should focus on business impact rather than backlog tasks. He recommends understanding an organization’s goals, proposing a radical idea tied to those goals, and building a focused working prototype over a weekend instead of waiting for formal requirements, approvals, or cross-functional support. He says prototypes should communicate one strong idea clearly and demonstrate that their creator can lead it. Rieseberg cites an Anthropic example in which relatively new engineers Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao built a graphical interface prototype for Claude Code over a weekend; the first public version shipped roughly eight days later. He says he is now looking at resumes and portfolios for small prototypes showing taste, empathy, and principled thinking, while still trying to determine how to interview people who build effectively with AI.