Meta told employees that it is going to allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during the interview process, according to internal Meta communications seen by 404 Media. The company has also asked existing employees to volunteer for a “mock AI-enabled interview,” the messages say.
It’s the latest indication that Silicon Valley giants are pushing software engineers to use AI in their jobs, and it signals a broader move toward hiring employees who can vibecode as part of their jobs.
“AI-Enabled Interviews—Call for Mock Candidates,” a post from earlier this month on an internal Meta message board reads. “Meta is developing a new type of coding interview in which candidates have access to an AI assistant. This is more representative of the developer environment that our future employees will work in, and also makes LLM-based cheating less effective.”
“We need mock candidates,” the post continues. “If you would like to experience a mock AI-enabled interview, please sign up in this sheet. The questions are still in development; data from you will help shape the future of interviewing at Meta.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made clear at numerous all-hands and in public podcast interviews that he is not just pushing the company’s software engineers towards using AI in their work, but that he foresees human beings managing “AI coding agents” that will write code for the company.
“I think this year, probably in 2025, we at Meta as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in January. “Over time we’ll get to a point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers … In the future people are going to be so much more creative, and they’re going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things.”
In April, Zuckerberg expanded on this slightly on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, where he said that “sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll reach the point where most of the code that’s going towards [AI] efforts is written by AI.”
While it’s true that many tech companies have pushed software engineers to use AI in their work, they have been slower to allow new applicants to use AI during the interview process. In fact, Anthropic, which makes the AI tool Claude, has specifically told job applicants that they cannot use AI during the interview process. To circumvent that type of ban, some AI tools promise to allow applicants to secretly use AI during coding interviews. The topic, in general, has been a controversial one in Silicon Valley. Established software engineers worry that the next batch of coders will be more AI “prompters” and “vibecoders” than software engineers, and that they may not know how to troubleshoot AI-written code when something goes wrong.
“We’re obviously focused on using AI to help engineers with their day-to-day work, so it should be no surprise that we’re testing how to provide these tools to applicants during interviews,” a Meta spokesperson told 404 Media.
