A proposal: how to hire junior engineers in the age of AI

The author proposes replacing the coding interview with a structured exercise in which candidates spend an hour or two extracting requirements from an LLM role-playing as a customer and directing a second LLM to build working software, with an agent generating tests and a human making the final judgment. He argues junior hiring has collapsed since 2023, that internships and elite-school or "hunger" filters are inadequate or biased, and that the exercise mirrors medicine's OSCE standardized-patient exam. The approach is untested, but he contends the company that solves junior hiring will gain a supply of affordable product engineers.