The standard technical interview tests whether you can reverse a linked list on a whiteboard. The actual job requires understanding a 200K-line codebase and making safe changes to systems you didn't build.
The gap between interview skills and job skills has always existed. AI made it wider.
What Changed
Developers with AI tools can solve LeetCode problems trivially. Copilot handles the syntax. Claude handles the algorithm. The "hard" interview question is now a 2-minute prompt.
But the hard part of the actual job — understanding unfamiliar code, tracing dependencies, making changes without breaking things — AI can't do alone. It requires judgment, context, and system-level thinking that no amount of autocomplete provides.