They Now Let You Use AI in the Interview

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For about a decade, the rule in technical intern interviews was simple. Blank editor, no internet, no help, forty five minutes. Everyone knew the game and everyone prepped for it the same way.

That rule broke this cycle. Google and Meta now permit AI assistants during coding rounds for Summer 2027 candidates. Other employers are following in different shapes: take homes that explicitly assume model use, case assessments that hand you a tool and watch what you do with it, analyst tests where the spreadsheet is pre-populated and the question is what you notice.

A lot of students read this as the interview getting easier. It is the opposite, and the reason is structural. When everyone has the same tool, the tool stops being a differentiator. The interviewer is no longer measuring whether you can produce an answer. They are measuring the part the model cannot do for you: whether you picked the right problem, whether you caught it when the output was wrong, and whether you can explain and extend something you did not type yourself.

Worth noting alongside this, the 2027 cycle is the first where AI and machine learning intern roles outpace traditional software engineering intern spots. The job changed and the interview followed it.

Here is how to prepare for a room where the assistant is allowed.

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Assume the problem was rewritten to survive the tool

If a company opens the interview to AI, they did not keep the old question. They swapped it for one where a clean first draft is not the finish line.

That usually means ambiguity was added on purpose. The requirements are underspecified. There is an edge case that the obvious solution silently mishandles. There is a constraint buried in a sentence that reads like flavor text. A model will happily generate a confident, wrong answer to an underspecified prompt, and that is exactly the failure they are watching for.

So your first move in an AI permitted round is not to type the prompt. It is to ask clarifying questions out loud. What is the expected input size. What happens on a tie. Should this be idempotent. Every question you ask before you generate is a point scored, and it narrows the prompt so the output is actually usable.

Practice out loud, not silently

Most students practice with a model the wrong way. They sit alone, paste the problem, read the answer, and feel prepared. Then in the interview they have to narrate their reasoning to a human while operating the tool, and they discover they have never done those two things at the same time.

Fix this the way you would fix any performance problem. Set a timer, open a problem you have not seen, and talk continuously. Say what you are about to ask the model and why. Read the output and say what you believe about it before you run it. Say what you are changing and what you expect to break.

Do ten of these. The first three will feel absurd. By the tenth, the narration is automatic, which is the whole point, because the narration is the thing being graded.

Know your own code well enough to defend it

The most common way candidates lose an AI permitted round is not the code. It is the follow up.

The interviewer will point at a line and ask why it is there. They will ask what happens if the input doubles. They will ask you to change one requirement and modify the solution live. If you accepted output you did not read closely, you will stall on all three, and stalling there reads worse than not finishing, because it tells them you cannot maintain what you produce.

Build a habit: after every generation, do a read pass before you run anything. Out loud, in two sentences, say what the code does and where it would break. If you cannot do that, you do not understand it yet, and you should ask the model to explain it before you move on. Thirty seconds spent there is cheaper than a four minute silence later.

Read the rules for each assessment separately

There is no universal policy and assuming one is how people get disqualified. Some employers permit assistants. Some forbid them and run proctoring or detection on take homes. Some allow them for take homes but not live rounds. Some say nothing at all.

Before you start any assessment, find the stated policy in the invite email, the platform instructions, and the role posting. If all three are silent, ask the recruiter in writing. That message takes one line and it protects you completely:

Nobody has ever been penalized for asking that. People are regularly penalized for guessing.

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What to say when they ask how you used it

At some point in the debrief, someone asks a version of "walk me through how you used the assistant here." Most candidates get defensive or apologetic. Both are wrong. This is a competence question and it has a good answer.

The good answer has three parts: what you decided before the tool, what you delegated, and what you verified after.

That answer describes judgment, delegation, and verification in about twenty seconds. It is the exact profile of a person they want doing the work in June, which is why they opened the tool in the first place.