The clearest sign that something broke in technical hiring is that the round everyone used to dread, the live coding interview, stopped telling interviewers what it used to. For two decades a candidate who could solve a problem on a shared screen was demonstrating something real in the moment. In 2026 that demonstration comes with an asterisk, because the person watching can no longer assume the candidate is the one doing the thinking.
Final Round AI published a piece arguing that behavioral interviews are replacing coding rounds. The direction is right and the framing is too clean. The honest version is more useful, and it splits along a line most candidates miss. Live coding is losing signal, and behavioral and system-design rounds are absorbing the weight. But coding rounds are not disappearing. At large companies they’re being defended and hardened, not retired. Where you’re interviewing determines which of those two stories applies to you.
What the posting data says about the 2026 stack
Start with the backdrop, because the interview changes are downstream of a change in the work itself. Four-Leaf’s analysis of 37,920 job postings found that AI fluency is now an expected part of how engineers work rather than a specialized credential. Only 14.6 percent of postings name a specific AI tool, and almost none require one, which means companies assume you’ll use AI in your workflow without spelling it out.
That assumption is the root of the interview problem. If using AI to write and reason about code is normal on the job, candidates will use it to prepare for and, where they can, to get through coding rounds. The skill the live round was built to measure, can this person produce working code under observation, is now partly a measure of how well they drive an assistant. Interviewers know it, so they’ve started discounting the signal.
Why live coding lost its signal
The mechanism is simple and worth naming, because the competitor framing asserts the trend without it. A coding interview was always a proxy. It assumed that watching someone solve a problem told you how they’d perform on the real work. That proxy held as long as one condition was true: the candidate in front of you was the one doing the thinking.
Yusuf Aytas, an engineering leader who interviews from the panel side, put it directly in his essay AI Broke Interviews: “The candidate sitting in front of you was the person actually doing the thinking. That assumption is now gone.” Once it’s gone, a clean solution no longer separates the strong candidate from the one with a good assistant and a second monitor.
The data on how often that happens is no longer anecdotal. CodeSignal, which runs technical assessments at scale, reported that the rate of flagged cheating attempts on assessments more than doubled in 2025, rising from 16 percent in 2024 to 35 percent in 2025. For entry-level assessments it went from 15 percent to 40 percent. The most common flags were off-screen referencing and answer similarity, the signatures of someone reading from a second source.
interviewing.io ran the survey that quantifies the interviewer side. In its 2025 report, How is AI changing interview processes, founder Aline Lerner found that 81 percent of FAANG interviewers suspected a candidate of using AI during an interview, about 31 percent had caught someone, and 75 percent believed AI assistance was letting weaker candidates pass rounds they shouldn’t. When three out of four interviewers think the round is passing people who can’t do the work, the round is no longer doing its job.
What’s actually replacing the signal, and what isn’t
Here’s where the clean narrative falls apart, and where the honest one is more valuable. “Coding rounds are being replaced” is not what the people running those rounds say is happening. In the same interviewing.io survey, of the 52 respondents at FAANG companies, zero said their company had moved away from algorithmic coding questions. Half expected a partial return to in-person coding specifically to close the AI gap.
So the shift is not a clean swap of one round for another. It’s two different responses depending on who’s hiring.
Large companies are defending the coding round. They’re adding proctoring, bringing interviews back on-site, and adjusting questions to be harder to solve with a hidden assistant. Gergely Orosz, in The Pulse, reported that 58 percent of interviewers had changed their questions to counter AI use. Some are going the other way entirely and inviting AI into the room. Orosz noted that Shopify’s head of engineering, Farhan Thawar, wants candidates using AI tools through most of the interview, on the theory that the real skill now is directing the tools well.
Smaller companies and teams that never had the volume to run a heavy coding gauntlet are the ones actually reweighting toward behavioral and work-sample rounds. Brian Jenney, a senior engineer who has designed interview loops, wrote in Coding Interviews in 2026 Are Harder Than Ever that “as coding becomes less and less of a reliable proxy for how well someone can do the job, companies are leaning harder on behavioral signals.” His blunter point is the one that explains why: “Most people don’t get fired because of technical errors. They get fired because of human and behavioral errors.”
That’s the real reason behavioral weight is rising. It was always predictive of on-the-job success, and now it’s one of the few signals AI can’t sit in the room and fake for you.
What behavioral rounds screen for from the hiring side
When a hiring manager leans harder on the behavioral round, they’re not looking for polished stories. They’re looking for evidence of the things that determine whether a hire works out after the offer, and those are exactly the things a coding score never captured.
Three signals do most of the work. The first is judgment, meaning what you chose to do when the right answer wasn’t obvious and what you traded off to do it. The second is ownership, meaning whether you talk about outcomes you were responsible for or activities you participated in. The third is how you handle being wrong, because a candidate who can describe a decision that didn’t work and what they changed is showing the one trait that survives contact with a real job.
The rounds that test these are getting harder to script. Interviewers follow up more, push on the specifics, and change a constraint to see whether you’re reasoning or reciting. The whole point is to get past the rehearsed version, which is the same reason the 30-minute screen is fading as a first filter. A prepared performance is now cheap to produce, so the rounds that reward it are losing value across the loop.
How to shift your prep if you’re interviewing in Q3 2026
The takeaway is not “stop practicing coding.” If you’re aiming at a large tech company, the coding round is still standard and is under more scrutiny than it was a year ago. The takeaway is that strong code alone no longer clears the bar, and your prep should reflect the split.
A few concrete moves.
Keep coding sharp, but practice out loud. Solve problems while narrating your reasoning, because the interviewer is now listening for the thinking they can no longer assume. Silent, correct solutions read worse than they used to.
Prepare real stories, not story-shaped answers. Have four to six examples ready, each with a specific decision you made, a tradeoff you accepted, and an outcome you can name. Include at least one where the call was wrong, because that’s the one good interviewers probe for.
Get reps on the rounds AI can’t fake for you. System design and live debugging both reward understanding over recall, and both are getting more weight precisely because they’re hard to outsource in real time.
Expect a round built to break your script. Somewhere in the loop, usually in a behavioral or design conversation, someone will keep asking “why” until the prepared answer runs out. That moment is the interview now. Treat it as the point, not the part to survive.
The behavioral round isn’t replacing the coding round so much as it’s reclaiming the weight it should have had all along, now that the coding round can’t carry as much on its own. Prepare for both, and prepare hardest for the parts of the conversation where there’s no answer to look up.
Originally published at https://four-leaf.ai on June 5, 2026.
