No coding test? Let one prototype speak for you

Juan Molina ·

An Anthropic engineering manager has dropped the coding interview and now looks for small prototypes. What that means for a senior LATAM engineer, and its limits.

An engineering manager at Anthropic has stopped giving candidates a coding interview. If you are a senior engineer in Latin America applying to US or EU teams, that matters less as a trend and more as a hint: when the test stops filtering, your evidence has to do the work.

What changed, in his words

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic who has led engineering for Claude.ai, Cowork and Claude Code Desktop, wrote on 27 October 2026 that he laid the traditional coding interview to rest this month. Small challenges were "a weak but useful predictor", he wrote, but "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both." He adds that his most impactful builders succeed regardless of how good they are at these tests (Felix Rieseberg, 27 October 2026).

He also writes: "I'm seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer. Hunger beats tenure." The Next Web covered the post on 28 October 2026 and noted that Google is expanding pilots of interviews where candidates may use Gemini, and that Anthropic says Claude writes 80% of its own code (The Next Web, 28 October 2026).

What he looks for instead

Rieseberg says he has not yet worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI. For now he scans resumes and portfolios "for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking" (Felix Rieseberg, 27 October 2026).

His advice is concrete. Understand what the company is trying to accomplish. Pick an ambitious idea that would move that goal. Build a working prototype over a weekend. Focus on one good idea, because cramming several into one prototype hides the good ones. His example: two relatively new Anthropic engineers, Anthony Morris and Alice Zhao, built a working prototype of a graphical interface for Claude Code over one weekend, and the first public version shipped roughly eight days later (Felix Rieseberg, 27 October 2026).

How a senior engineer can use this

The post is written for engineers without status or social capital, but the logic applies to you. A senior profile from Latin America is often read through a CV and a title. One small, working prototype tied to the hiring company's goal shows judgment in a way a title does not.

Checklist for one prototype

  • Read what the company says it is trying to achieve, and pick one problem that sits close to it.
  • Choose one idea, not three. Cut everything that does not serve it.
  • Build something that runs, over a weekend, using AI tools openly.
  • Write a short README: the problem, the choice you made, what you left out and why.
  • Show where you corrected or rejected what the AI produced. That is where judgment shows.
  • Put the link at the top of your CV and in your first message to the recruiter.

Honest limits

This is one manager's view on his own team, not a market rule. Many companies still run coding interviews, and Rieseberg himself says he has not found the right interview yet. Prepare for the classic test too, and ask each company how its process works. The prototype is an extra piece of evidence, not a replacement for preparation.