What This Is About
I increasingly feel that many engineering interviews are still structured like a first date. They are good at measuring synchronous work, speed, style fit, ease of contact, and the ability to make a good impression quickly. Evaluation of the consequences of someone’s work is much rarer. The problem is that real engineering work looks less like a first date and more like a long marriage with consequences.
This is not about saying that synchronous work is no longer needed or that all live formats are pointless. The point is narrower, but unpleasant: in AI-assisted development, live performance is getting worse at measuring the part of engineering value that is actually becoming the bottleneck.
As the machine takes over more and more local execution, the bottleneck is no longer how fast a person responds under observation. The bottleneck is the ability to hold the foundations of the task, notice a conflict, record a constraint, explain why one path was chosen and another rejected, and leave behind an artifact.
What I Mean by an Artifact
