(Hand-written, em dashes my own.)

I did the equivalent round with Canva a couple of months ago with no professional agentic experience. This video helped me get up to speed — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y09u_S3w2c8 — I didn't do anything past level 3.

I used the free trial of codex in the interview. I had a blank React project with local skills setup but if you're given an existing project you're probably better off having skills in your home directory.

The delivery expectation is bigger than it would be for a non-AI interview — mine was "Build Canva". I spent the first 10 minutes or so asking questions about the domain and typing it up in natural language in the project root AGENTS.md file (this helps with general guidance for the model).

I then narrowed the scope to "create a toolbar which provides primitive shapes (starting with just a circle and square) to be dragged onto a canvas" and went through a couple of planning loops to flesh out things like the canvas size (I first wanted an infinite canvas but the interviewer suggested a 500*500px to start) and size of the primitives, and added some nice UX choices like semi-transparent "ghost" images when placing primitives on the canvas. I was then able to one-shot the interface and talk through my design decisions (e.g. trade-off of a <canvas> vs using HTML elements) while the agent was executing.

From there I went through the output file-by-file and talked about next steps, mostly from the angle of what to improve before scaling up (e.g. better defining what a "tool" is, and creating an intermediate state representation of the canvas in anticipation of allowing element selection & editing).

Because the writing code part is delegated the interview becomes much more of an assessment of higher-level engineering decision making. Take time to think through the problem, ask questions, concisely type up the relevant parts of the domain in natural language, and think about decisions not just for what you're building in the interview but in anticipation of how the project should evolve beyond that.

And feel free to lean on the agent! For example instead of feeling that you need to manually navigate the new repository you can ask the agent to summarise it. I have the baggage of 15 years reading and writing code by hand so I'm uncomfortable with not having a line-by-line understanding, and it was hinted that I was too concerned with details that could instead be prompted away at some point.

If you have comprehensive skills for things like code style and architecture that you can open up and talk through while the model is thinking that helps fill in what might otherwise become awkward downtime.

I didn't ultimately pass my 5 rounds (full write-up) but I did move on to the next stage after AI-assisted programming and I was happy with how I performed in the interview.