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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

> a session with Gemini 2.5 Pro (without Code Execution tools)

How good are you at programming on a whiteboard? How good is anybody? With code execution tools withheld from me, I'll freely admit that I'm pretty shit at programming. Hell, I barely remember the syntax in some of the more esoteric, unpracticed places of my knowledge. Thus, it's hard not to see case studies like this as dunking on a blindfolded free throw shooter, and calling it analysis.

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> How good are you at programming on a whiteboard?

pretty good?

I could certainly do a square root

(given enough time, that one would take me a while)

With a slide rule you can start from 92200 or so, long division with 9.22 gives 9.31 or so, next guess 9.265 is almost on point, where long division says that's off by 39.6 so the next approximation +19.8 is already 92,669.8... yeah the long divisions suck but I think you could get this one within 10 minutes if the interviewer required you to.

Also, don't take a role that interviews like that unless they work on something with the stakes of Apollo 13, haha

I actually have a slide rule that was my father's in school

great for teaching logarithms

It’s like that but if the blindfolded free throw shooter was also the scorekeeper and the referee & told you with complete confidence that the ball went in, when you looked away for a second.

It's pretty common for software developers to be asked to code up some random algorithm on a whiteboard as part of the interview process.

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