Meta Now Lets You Use AI in Coding Interviews. Most Candidates Use It Wrong.

Meta replaced one of its onsite coding rounds with a 60-minute AI-assisted session. Candidates get access to GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Llama 4 Maverick — right inside CoderPad. Most candidates treat this as "code faster with autocomplete." That is the wrong mental model. And it is why they fail. The Interview Changed. The Evaluation Didn't. Meta is not the only company doing this. Google, Rippling, and a growing number of tech companies now allow or encourage AI tool usage during technical interviews. The CoderPad State of Tech Hiring 2026 report confirms the shift: hiring teams evaluate how you collaborate with AI, not whether you can memorize Dijkstra's algorithm. But here is what candidates miss: the evaluation criteria got harder, not easier. When you had no AI, interviewers watched you think through a problem from scratch. Now they watch you delegate, validate, and iterate — three skills that are significantly harder to fake. A 2026 technical interview now has th