How do you assess developers' AI-assisted coding skills in interviews?

AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) are now part of most developers’ daily workflow, they speed up prototyping, planning, implementation but also change how we think and debug.

I’m curious how you assess developers’ ability to leverage these tools efficiently during the recruiting process. Any tips to share? Any return on experience?

Answering with the assumption this is for interviews; we ask them to build a simple component of our app within 1 hour, using any resources they like. We judge them based on their communication (breaking down the problem), code quality, and final result.

Do you want to hire a developer with 5+ years of LLM experience? Or 3+ years of Claude experience?

Hire learners, or hire people who teach people (evaluate new tools, write guides, conduct training, mentor, etc.).

Let them use whatever they need. The result is the most important because that's how they will end up doing their work. Do not restrict anything.