Live coding stopped telling interviewers what it used to, and most candidates haven't updated their prep. The round didn't get easier. The signal got cheaper to fake, so the rounds that survived got harder in ways your old practice doesn't cover. Here's how the split actually breaks down by company size, and what it changes about how you prep this quarter.
For two decades a candidate who could solve a problem on a shared screen was demonstrating something real in the moment. In 2026 that demonstration comes with an asterisk, because the person watching can no longer assume the candidate is the one doing the thinking.
Why live coding lost its signal
A coding interview was always a proxy. It assumed that watching someone solve a problem told you how they'd perform on the real work, and that proxy held as long as one condition was true: the candidate in front of you was the one doing the thinking. Yusuf Aytas, an engineering leader who interviews from the panel side, put it directly in his essay AI Broke Interviews: "The candidate sitting in front of you was the person actually doing the thinking. That assumption is now gone." Once it's gone, a clean solution no longer separates the strong candidate from the one with a good assistant and a second monitor.
