Out the Leetcode Mines
2026-07-10
A Rant
For a couple years now, it’s been generally accepted that most companies use some sort of AI in their hiring process. The reasoning is simple: with demand far outpacing supply for engineering roles, it doesn’t feel reasonable to expect an employee to sort through thousands of applications. This is understandable.
So, the equally understandable response by applicants is to begin using AI on their side of the bargain. Why would you bother to cater something to a human reader if the first person to see it will be a robot? So you run your resume through an LLM to fine-tune it perfectly for each and every job, ensuring that you hit every keyword and bullet point that you think the LLM will be looking for.
Suddenly, we have a situation where computers are reading thousands of nearly-identical resumes written by other computers, and arbitrarily selecting based off of unknowable criteria. Incredible amounts of computing power being spent on both sides, canceling each other out, reducing the process back to, essentially, random chance. Once the initial crowd has been filtered out, the original human hiring managers step in and start doing the actual work.
At the end, both parties are left with less information than they would have otherwise had: The resumes have been fine-tuned beyond recognition, conveying no useful information about the applicants or their capabilities, and the applicants have no sense of what they could or should have done differently.
Not long ago, a very silly website called Moltbook received a lot of very silly press, purporting to be a “reddit-style social network” for AI agents. The idea was that you’d just let these robots talk to each other, and see what happens. Breathless, pearl-clutching, financially biased evangelists pointed to anecdotal conversations where they seemed to be having discussions, planning, scheming, etc. It looked, to them, like evidence for the future potential (and future dangers) of AI.
This didn’t amount to much. People willing to assign some further scrutiny to the website found aimless, meaningless conversations, and human vandals playing pranks. In addition, the vibe-coded application itself was found to be horribly insecure, and was easily hacked by security researchers.
Though the idea of AI talking to AI is compelling from a science-fiction perspective, there’s no real meat there. Functionally, it’s not any different than an AI talking to itself, or an AI responding to a human. Though we can build scaffolding that imitates this behavior, LLMs don’t learn in the same way a person learns. The end result of two AIs talking to each other isn’t more content, it’s less. A ping-pong back-and-forth erosion of meaning, nuance, and intention, reducing the information in the middle to the most generic, hollow version of itself. Humans using AI to cater information to other AIs, shooting as hard as they can for a dead-center smoothed-out average.
Song of the Day:
An unusually well-photographed clip, shot on grainy 16mm film. Parquet Courts, for this tour, teamed up with NYC weirdos PC Worship as some kind of not-so-super supergroup. The Television-worshipping indie stars bounce off of the artsier, jazzier PC Worship to create a brand-new cover of a 40-year-old jam. Dissonant vocals, empty space, pick-scrapes, saxophone blasts, culminating in a plodding, atmospheric groove. Bob your head along with them, join in.