Coding interviews test whether someone can recall algorithms from memory. That's not the job anymore. Trace puts candidates through real work with a real AI assistant — and captures the reasoning trail of how they think, delegate, and decide.
Not “can you code without help?” — but “how well do you work with AI?”
The problem
LeetCode grinds and whiteboard algorithms measure memorized recall under artificial constraints. Engineers don't work that way anymore — they work alongside AI, every day. And a green/red pass/fail is opaque to the non-technical founders who most need to hire well.
How it works
Candidates move through the actual arc of engineering — plan, review, build — each one instrumented to surface signal a pass/fail test can't.
The candidate scopes and plans a real feature — with an AI assistant and web search at their side. No blank whiteboard; the real messy start of any project.
The candidate reviews a realistic pull request against a real codebase — the kind of code they'll spend most of their week reading, whether a human or an agent wrote it.
The candidate builds live in a real cloud IDE alongside an AI coding agent — fast and smart models, with subagent orchestration. Actual shipping conditions.
The signal it captures
Behind every phase, Trace captures the reasoning trail — the telemetry and the transcript of how a candidate thinks and orchestrates. The output isn't a score. It's a picture of how someone actually works.
The prompts, the corrections, the re-scoping. Whether they lead the agent or get led by it.
The judgment call on what to hand off and what to own — including how they wield subagents.
Whether they catch the subtle bug in generated code — or wave it through. Taste, made visible.
How much working, considered progress they make under real conditions — not puzzle speed.
The decisions that don't show up in a diff — scope cuts, tradeoffs, knowing what "good" is.
A transcript and trace a non-technical founder can actually follow and reason about.
Who it's for
Move past trivia and see the real thing: how a candidate plans, reviews, and ships alongside AI — the way your team actually works.
Hire your first engineers with confidence, even under pressure. Trace turns the interview into a clear, comparable read on how each candidate operates.
You can't read a diff — you don't have to. Trace gives you a readable trace of how a candidate thinks, so you can evaluate engineers without being one.
Tell us a bit about you and we'll be in touch — and you can stop testing for a skill the job no longer needs.