The org I am at we have build an internal harness for coding, and we only hire devs that do work "AI-first". We did start hiring juniors as well as seniors; the process for either of them is the same. We drop them into any of our repos without any prior knowledge of what the project is about; and ask them to interact with the harness to build a larger feature that has been specified in project management. For the task, they can only use AI; there is no room for any manual coding at this particular org. We grade them more or less on their interaction and problem solving patterns, as well as asking us questions; and how they write prompts. The coding interview last 2 hours, and there are only 3 rounds of interviews. Before the coding interview, we do send out a brief of what it will entail.

Maybe this sounds a little strange, but this has worked exceptionally well, as we have now several juniors working with us, that do still get checked by seniors. The harness itself which holds several levels of standards, rules as well as quality gates, allows these juniors to ship out a huge amount of high quality code. We still reject about 80% of the people who interview with us, because even though they know how to code with AI, their AI interaction patterns just aren't on par with what we need. I really started to like this process. Also to clarify, the harness isn't some Coding agent setup, but rather a whole setup that works well with Codex, Claude or Cursor; its well maintained versioned and constantly improved upon, with a huge amount of automations, rules and hooks. The moment someone starts working on anything at all, this is immediately connected and tracked with project management.