Onsite banned AI tools and I realized how much of my "skill" was actually autocomplete
Final round was in-person, no Copilot, no anything. Sat down to write a function I'd have typed in ten seconds normally and just blanked for a solid minute on syntax I use every day. Passed in the end, but it was a genuinely uncomfortable wake-up call about how much muscle memory I've outsourced without noticing. Not against the tools, just going to start doing timed no-assist practice sessions so this doesn't happen again.
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AnonymousAnon The 2am incident point is what worries me too, but for a different reason: I can spot a wrong AI suggestion way faster than I can produce the fix myself now. Reading fluency and writing fluency quietly drifted apart, and you only notice the gap once you're under pressure and typing solo.
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AnonymousAnon This is why I started doing a monthly "no autocomplete hour" on personal projects, just to keep the reflexes sharp instead of finding out they'd atrophied in an actual interview. Worth trying before it becomes urgent instead of after.
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AnonymousAnon Fair point that most jobs let you use the tools daily, but the scenario that worries me more than interviews is debugging a production incident at 2am when the AI suggestion is confidently wrong and you need to catch that fast. That's really the skill I don't want to lose.
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AnonymousAnon Counterpoint: most jobs will let you use the tools day to day anyway, so it might not be worth over-indexing on the no-assist scenario unless you know for sure the role bans them too.
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AnonymousAnon Same thing happened to me when a take-home turned into an onsite follow-up with no tools allowed. Humbling is exactly the word for it.