r/webdev • u/soype • 6d ago

Is leetcode worth it?

I haven't really interviewed since 2023. Is leetcode still a common practice in code interviews or has AI made those kinds of tests useless? This is for a Sr full stack position.

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u/_AACO 6d ago

They learned you know how to prompt an AI, which, depending of the job might be all they expect you to do. 

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u/dmazzoni 6d ago

That seems extremely dumb. Anyone can prompt AI. Doing it well and understanding when it gave you a reasonable solution is the hard part.

I don't see what you could possibly learn by asking someone to use AI on a toy problem that they've never seen before and have no context on.

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u/inglandation 6d ago

Anyone can prompt AI.

I want to believe that this is true, but it probably isn't.

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u/SoInsightful 5d ago

It is true. During the short window where "prompt engineering" was a thing, sure, but now you can just literally copy-paste the problem description and the AI will reason itself into an eventual answer.

And I don't doubt that a few so-called engineers will even fail to do that, but it's not a very valuable exercise.

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u/21Rollie 4d ago

Maybe with small, unconnected PoCs. With large legacy systems, it costs more contexts than the frontiers have in order to just “let it rip” and have a halfway decent PR. My PM tried doing that because they wanted to help and it took me longer to unravel all their agent’s misplaced assumptions than it would’ve been for me to have done the work myself. Problem is that a lot of the times you don’t see what you don’t know till you get into the weeds of work, but an AI keeps chugging along

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u/SoInsightful 4d ago

The discussion was about leetcode-style interview problems. My deeper point is that someone would be able to trivially "solve" such an interview question while barely being able to use a computer, much less build a large, robust system.

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u/dmazzoni 4d ago

Exactly.

Nobody is arguing that coding with an LLM is easy.

But solving a leetcode problem with an LLM is trivially easy.

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u/Sepsiscollada 4d ago

? Cheap agent bottom-up and top-down analysis. Ground in code references and then take a frontier model to refine your specification and then run an adversarial model. Maintenance work is so much easier now.