I came across a jaw-dropping post on Reddit this week—shared by a tech company that interviewed 450 candidates for junior dev roles out of 12,000 applicants… and hired no one. At first, I thought, This has to be clickbait. But after 3mins of reading, the truth was forced down my throat— most applicants were just copying and pasting code.
Code copying and pasting is easy to understand, right?
It’s when a developer copy a code snippet from somewhere and use it in their own work.
Is that a bad thing? No, we all copy code. From AI, stackoverflow, and the internet. It’s part of the workflow.
Fastforward to where it gets interesting >>
The company gave candidates a coding challenge and allowed them to use ChatGPT. Sounds fair, isn’t it?
But after a few minutes, each person was asked to explain the code they wrote or talk about how fast the code runs and how much memory it uses. Guess what? Most of them froze!
Why? Because they had pasted answers from AI without understanding them.
The company called it “vibe coding”—a strangely accurate term for what happens when people rely on AI to feel like they’re solving problems, without actually doing the thinking.
Let’s Be Real About AI
AI are not a substitute for comprehension. And if you can’t explain your solution, do you truly own it?
I’m not anti-AI, and if you must know, I use it every day. But tools are only as powerful as the hands and minds that wield them. In the tech space, you don’t get hired for what you can paste.You get hired for what you understand, build, and explain.
So, to aspiring devs and tech hopefuls: Are you using AI to learn or to hide?
Because there’s a big difference.
Top comments (1)
I think that is going to become a bigger problem the more AI is getting used.
I just read an article about AI where AI got better by keeping all the agents it produced instead of only keeping the best of class agent.
I think that goes for humans as well. We are keeping all the experiences and information we learn, and make a decision based on that. If you opt for one way of doing something, you will get stuck some time in the future. Even bad options at first can become good later.