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Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuine

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

xfax 5mo ago
To understand the code they are shipping requires some level of proficiency. Their inability to do fizzbuzz without AI calls that into question.
jadar 5mo ago
It’s about deeply understanding what you’re doing. Like as a kid before you knew how to ride a bike, you could sit on a bike and peddling, but until it “clicked” you couldn’t balance and keep going forward stable. Fizzbuzz tests your ability to reason through a problem that seems simple on its face, but is easy to get wrong and/or overthink.
IanCal 5mo ago
Fizzbuzz is such an incredibly simple problem if you can’t do it I struggle to see how you’d be able to complete any task that requires very basic reasoning and very basic coding knowledge. And if an AI system can do those parts, what am I getting for spending tens of thousands of pounds per year by hiring a person who can’t? Wouldn’t I just tag codex on the tickets? I’m not talking about gotcha level stuff here where the first time it didn’t compile because of a bracket or anything, or even first time wrong. They couldn’t do Fizzbuzz in a language of their choice, at all. Those that could were always annoyed at having to do such things because how could someone coming for a contract position not be able to do this? Without seeing what a filter it really was.
- eudamoniac 5mo ago
  I feel the same way about inverting a binary tree, but a lot of people act like it's an arduous request. I am guessing it's because they've never read the description of what inverting a binary tree is, but maybe people are just that bad at recursion.
  - krapht 5mo ago
    You can go your entire career without recursing, or using a tree data structure in its raw form (i.e. you only use it as part of a library)
    - marshray 5mo ago
      Right. For the first many decades of computing, recursion was just always the wrong answer for a production software system. (Feel free to provide a counter-example, but please begin with an explanation of how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on this platform). So what tree-traversal/quicksort problems tend to measure is how long it's been since you last did CS class homework problems.
      - saagarjha 5mo ago
        There's no need to put your data on the call stack.
        marshray 5mo ago
        Great. Please explain how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on the particular platform you're proposing to recurse upon.
        saagarjha 5mo ago
        I feel like you have not responded to my comment.
  - ptrl600 5mo ago
    Yeah, you read it and expect the inversion to be inside-out or upside-down, defined in some hopelessly arcane way.
hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.
- eastbound 5mo ago
  And yet, some people argue that you shouldn’t ask a developer to align 3 “if” and 1 “for”!!! The energy spent arguing that those 4 instructions in a row “are not a mark of someone who can write code” would have better been spent firing them.
  - hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
    Firing people is problematic. I'd be okay with it if the economy wasn't utter trash. It's way better to do the work upfront and prefer false negatives over false positives. Even better would be if we had a well-respected credential, so both employees and employers can both avoid these long interview loops. I'd much rather get hazed once in a big way than tons of little hazings over a life time.
- marshray 5mo ago
  I wrote the "function to reverse a string" in a job interview once. Then the interviewer reminded me that strrev() had been part of the standard C library since K&R. I'd been programming in C(++) for ~15 years by then and had never had the occasion to reverse a string. I still wonder whether that makes it a good job interview question, or a terrible one. Some of both probably.
  - saagarjha 5mo ago
    strrev is not a standard C function. I actually don't think my computer even has it (it's a Mac).
    - marshray 5mo ago
      Well I don't feel so bad for not having known it then. Thanks!
tardedmeme 5mo ago
For the same reason it's important your mechanic can identify which parts of a car are the wheel. Who cares as long as the car is fixed, right? As long as the mechanic can Chinese-room his way to a working car, why does it matter how much of it he actually understands? And why hire the mechanic instead of hiring the Chinese room?
ekidd 5mo ago
> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others. Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec and hand it to Claude Code, then they're providing zero value. I could do that myself, and frequently do. The actual bottleneck is people who can notice, "The god object is crumbling under the weight of managing 6 separate concerns with insufficient abstraction." Or "Claude has created 5 duplicate frameworks for deploying the app on Docker. We need to simplify this down to 1 or we're in hell." I will happy fight to hire people who can do the latter work. But those people can all solve fizzbuzz in their sleep. People who just "ship code that matches a spec" without understanding the technical details are providing close to zero value right now. There is an interesting niche for people with deep knowledge of customer workflows who can prompt Claude Code. These people can't build finished products using Claude. But they can iterate rapidly on designs until they find a hit. Which we can then fix using people with deeper engineering knowledge and taste. But if you're not bringing either deep customer knowledge or actual engineering knowledge, you're not adding much these days.
- freedomben 5mo ago
  > Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. I also use Claude with tmux. Can you share how you get the voice messages from the Claudes?
  - ekidd 5mo ago
    Tell Claude you want to set up notifications, using "hooks", including "Notification" and "Stop" and anything new they've added. Claude can figure out how to do this for your operating system. It's not perfect—sometimes a Claude notifies 3 minutes after it stopped doing anything. But it's helpful when I'm running multiple Claudes and also reviewing code elsewhere. Your brain may feel like someone put it in a blender. Be warned.
hack1312 5mo ago
If you can’t do fizzbuzz without AI you have no business being in this career.
Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? The inability to write fizzbuzz strongly implies their inability to understand what they've shipped. Review is some significant portion of the job. Understanding of the product is also part of the job. Specs are also in a sense, scaled down, fuzzy, natural language descriptions of a feature. The fuzziness is the source of a bugs, or at least a mismatch between the actual desired feature and what was written down at spec writing time. As such, just matching a spec is just the bare minimum that a good dev should be doing. They should be understanding what the spec is _not_ saying, understanding holes in their implementation, how their implementation enables or hinders the next feature and the next, next feature, etc. I don't think any of that is possible without understanding what was actually implemented.
gilrain 5mo ago
If they’re not a value add over the base AI, they aren’t worth hiring over just using the base AI.
koliber 5mo ago
How will you know that it produced correct code if you don’t know how to write it yourself?
jaredklewis 5mo ago
If you can’t even write a for loop, how can you verify the ai code you generated isn’t going to wipe the prod database?
unethical_ban 5mo ago
First: FizzBuzz is a test to know if you understand the most basic constructs of programming. The kind of thing you learn in the first week of CS101. I forgot what it was, and when I looked at the problem I knew the answer. More broadly: In the short/medium term, we still need humans who have the skills to understand software largely on their own. We will always need those who understand software engineering and architecture. Perhaps in 25 years LLMs will be so good that learning Python by hand will be like learning assembly today. But not yet. The field is not ready for new practitioners to be know-nothing Prompt engineers. If we do that, we cut the legs out from under the education pipeline for programming.
anigbrowl 5mo ago
Why hire them at all then, just ask them what their favorite AI is and use that
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Because I'm busy already doing that and need a copy of me/close enough to one, to do more of that.
  - unrealhoang 5mo ago
    So not being able to write fizzbuzz is nowhere close to me.
dabbledash 5mo ago
If the job does not require a person to be able to fizzbuzz, it probably doesn't require a person at all.
varenc 5mo ago
I can see this perspective, but FizzBuzz is such a low bar that so many can pass, I'd greatly prefer to hire someone that can ship code that matches a spec do this challenge.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

xfax 5mo ago

To understand the code they are shipping requires some level of proficiency. Their inability to do fizzbuzz without AI calls that into question.

jadar 5mo ago

It’s about deeply understanding what you’re doing. Like as a kid before you knew how to ride a bike, you could sit on a bike and peddling, but until it “clicked” you couldn’t balance and keep going forward stable. Fizzbuzz tests your ability to reason through a problem that seems simple on its face, but is easy to get wrong and/or overthink.

IanCal 5mo ago

Fizzbuzz is such an incredibly simple problem if you can’t do it I struggle to see how you’d be able to complete any task that requires very basic reasoning and very basic coding knowledge. And if an AI system can do those parts, what am I getting for spending tens of thousands of pounds per year by hiring a person who can’t? Wouldn’t I just tag codex on the tickets? I’m not talking about gotcha level stuff here where the first time it didn’t compile because of a bracket or anything, or even first time wrong. They couldn’t do Fizzbuzz in a language of their choice, at all. Those that could were always annoyed at having to do such things because how could someone coming for a contract position not be able to do this? Without seeing what a filter it really was.

eudamoniac 5mo ago
I feel the same way about inverting a binary tree, but a lot of people act like it's an arduous request. I am guessing it's because they've never read the description of what inverting a binary tree is, but maybe people are just that bad at recursion.
- krapht 5mo ago
  You can go your entire career without recursing, or using a tree data structure in its raw form (i.e. you only use it as part of a library)
  - marshray 5mo ago
    Right. For the first many decades of computing, recursion was just always the wrong answer for a production software system. (Feel free to provide a counter-example, but please begin with an explanation of how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on this platform). So what tree-traversal/quicksort problems tend to measure is how long it's been since you last did CS class homework problems.
    - saagarjha 5mo ago
      There's no need to put your data on the call stack.
      - marshray 5mo ago
        Great. Please explain how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on the particular platform you're proposing to recurse upon.
        saagarjha 5mo ago
        I feel like you have not responded to my comment.
- ptrl600 5mo ago
  Yeah, you read it and expect the inversion to be inside-out or upside-down, defined in some hopelessly arcane way.

hnthrow0287345 5mo ago

It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.

eastbound 5mo ago
And yet, some people argue that you shouldn’t ask a developer to align 3 “if” and 1 “for”!!! The energy spent arguing that those 4 instructions in a row “are not a mark of someone who can write code” would have better been spent firing them.
- hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
  Firing people is problematic. I'd be okay with it if the economy wasn't utter trash. It's way better to do the work upfront and prefer false negatives over false positives. Even better would be if we had a well-respected credential, so both employees and employers can both avoid these long interview loops. I'd much rather get hazed once in a big way than tons of little hazings over a life time.
marshray 5mo ago
I wrote the "function to reverse a string" in a job interview once. Then the interviewer reminded me that strrev() had been part of the standard C library since K&R. I'd been programming in C(++) for ~15 years by then and had never had the occasion to reverse a string. I still wonder whether that makes it a good job interview question, or a terrible one. Some of both probably.
- saagarjha 5mo ago
  strrev is not a standard C function. I actually don't think my computer even has it (it's a Mac).
  - marshray 5mo ago
    Well I don't feel so bad for not having known it then. Thanks!

tardedmeme 5mo ago

For the same reason it's important your mechanic can identify which parts of a car are the wheel. Who cares as long as the car is fixed, right? As long as the mechanic can Chinese-room his way to a working car, why does it matter how much of it he actually understands? And why hire the mechanic instead of hiring the Chinese room?

ekidd 5mo ago

> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others. Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec and hand it to Claude Code, then they're providing zero value. I could do that myself, and frequently do. The actual bottleneck is people who can notice, "The god object is crumbling under the weight of managing 6 separate concerns with insufficient abstraction." Or "Claude has created 5 duplicate frameworks for deploying the app on Docker. We need to simplify this down to 1 or we're in hell." I will happy fight to hire people who can do the latter work. But those people can all solve fizzbuzz in their sleep. People who just "ship code that matches a spec" without understanding the technical details are providing close to zero value right now. There is an interesting niche for people with deep knowledge of customer workflows who can prompt Claude Code. These people can't build finished products using Claude. But they can iterate rapidly on designs until they find a hit. Which we can then fix using people with deeper engineering knowledge and taste. But if you're not bringing either deep customer knowledge or actual engineering knowledge, you're not adding much these days.

freedomben 5mo ago
> Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. I also use Claude with tmux. Can you share how you get the voice messages from the Claudes?
- ekidd 5mo ago
  Tell Claude you want to set up notifications, using "hooks", including "Notification" and "Stop" and anything new they've added. Claude can figure out how to do this for your operating system. It's not perfect—sometimes a Claude notifies 3 minutes after it stopped doing anything. But it's helpful when I'm running multiple Claudes and also reviewing code elsewhere. Your brain may feel like someone put it in a blender. Be warned.

hack1312 5mo ago

If you can’t do fizzbuzz without AI you have no business being in this career.

Octoth0rpe 5mo ago

> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? The inability to write fizzbuzz strongly implies their inability to understand what they've shipped. Review is some significant portion of the job. Understanding of the product is also part of the job. Specs are also in a sense, scaled down, fuzzy, natural language descriptions of a feature. The fuzziness is the source of a bugs, or at least a mismatch between the actual desired feature and what was written down at spec writing time. As such, just matching a spec is just the bare minimum that a good dev should be doing. They should be understanding what the spec is _not_ saying, understanding holes in their implementation, how their implementation enables or hinders the next feature and the next, next feature, etc. I don't think any of that is possible without understanding what was actually implemented.

gilrain 5mo ago

If they’re not a value add over the base AI, they aren’t worth hiring over just using the base AI.

koliber 5mo ago

How will you know that it produced correct code if you don’t know how to write it yourself?

jaredklewis 5mo ago

If you can’t even write a for loop, how can you verify the ai code you generated isn’t going to wipe the prod database?

unethical_ban 5mo ago

First: FizzBuzz is a test to know if you understand the most basic constructs of programming. The kind of thing you learn in the first week of CS101. I forgot what it was, and when I looked at the problem I knew the answer. More broadly: In the short/medium term, we still need humans who have the skills to understand software largely on their own. We will always need those who understand software engineering and architecture. Perhaps in 25 years LLMs will be so good that learning Python by hand will be like learning assembly today. But not yet. The field is not ready for new practitioners to be know-nothing Prompt engineers. If we do that, we cut the legs out from under the education pipeline for programming.

anigbrowl 5mo ago

Why hire them at all then, just ask them what their favorite AI is and use that

fragmede 5mo ago
Because I'm busy already doing that and need a copy of me/close enough to one, to do more of that.
- unrealhoang 5mo ago
  So not being able to write fizzbuzz is nowhere close to me.

dabbledash 5mo ago

If the job does not require a person to be able to fizzbuzz, it probably doesn't require a person at all.

varenc 5mo ago

I can see this perspective, but FizzBuzz is such a low bar that so many can pass, I'd greatly prefer to hire someone that can ship code that matches a spec do this challenge.