alt Hacker NewsThere's even a rocket emoji in server console.logs... There are memes with ChatGPT and rocket emojis as a sign of AI use. The whole repo looks super vibe-coded, emojis, abundance of redundant comments, all in perfect English and grammar, and the readme also has that "chatty" feel to it.
I'm not saying that using AI for take-home assignments is bad/unethical overall, but you need to be honest about it. If he was lying to them about not using any AI assistance to write all those emojis and folder structure map in the repo, then the CTO had a good nose and rightfully caught him.
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If you're using AI for an interview, you are basically telling them "you could just not bother with hiring me and use AI yourself" which is neither good for you nor them.
Oh my god Becky, there's even a rocket emoji in the server console logs!
Should I also be "honest" about tab-completion? Where do you draw the line? Maybe I should be punished for having an internet connection too. Using AI for docker/readme's/simple scaffolding I would have done anyways? Oh the horror!
There was no lying because there was no discussion or mention of AI at all. Had they asked me, I'd have happily told them yes I obviously use AI to help me save time on grunt-work, I've been doing this stuff for like 15 years.
It's an unpaid take-home assignment. You'd have to be smoking crack to think that I would be rawdogging this. Imagine if I had a family or a wife or an existing job? I'd dump them after getting linked their assignment document.
Honestly at this point in the AI winter if you are a guy who has AI-inspired paranoia then I don't want to work for you because you are not "in the know".
As a big believer in documentation and communication in general, there's this inevitable double-bind that people hate whatever you give them and also hate it if you give them nothing. LLMs have made this worse.
No emojis and any effort to be comprehensive? Everyone complains "what is this wall of text", or "this is industry not grad school so cut it out with the fancy stuff" or "no one spends that much time on anything and it must be AI generated". (Frequently just a way of saying that they hate to read, and naively believe that even irreducibly complex stuff is actually simple).
Stuff that's got emojis, a friendly casual tone and isn't information dense? Well that's very chatty and cute, it also has to be AI and can't be valuable.
Since you can't win with docs, the best approach is to produce high quality diagrams that are simultaneously useful for a wide audience from novice to expert. The only problem is that even producing high quality diagrams at a ratio of 1 diagram per 1k lines of code is still very time consuming to produce if you're putting lots of thought into it, double so if you're fighting the diagramming tools, or if you want something that's easy for multiple stakeholders with potentially very different job descriptions to take in. Everyone will call it inadequate, ask why it took so long, and ask for the missing docs that they will hate anyway!
On the bright side, LLMs are pretty great at generating mermaid, either from code, or natural language descriptions of data-flows. Diagrams-as-code without needing a whole application UI or one of a limited number of your orgs lucid-chart licenses is making "Don't like it? Submit a PR" a pretty small ask. Skin in the game helps to curbs endless bike-shedding criticism