“I think what I hear from most companies is they say, first step is we give them an exercise and we want them to really go nuts on the … to solve this. … Now, after they pass this, you do a walkthrough and you actually say, please explain me what happened. Why is this a good idea?”
Context. Debois relays what he hears from companies about interviewing engineers in the age of coding agents; it is his account of other companies' practice, not Tessl's.
Patrick Debois, Product DevRel Lead. Speaks from developer-relations work at Tessl and from teams he has seen adopt coding agents; a vendor employee, so he describes other organizations' practice second-hand and promotional framing is possible.
Tessl sells AI or agent tooling, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.
How this was checked
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-10-31).
Matched in the whisper transcript. The first … omits the word 'AI' and the second omits 'If they have help from the AI...' through 'Now,'. Remaining wording matches. Speaker is Debois.
How to cite this passage
Patrick Debois (Tessl), “Coding Agents Don't Scale Themselves. Neither Do Your Teams. The Rise of Agent Enablement”, AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 (YouTube), 2026-07-02, at 16:09. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJtYuqwm7E Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/tessl-hiring-exercise-go-nuts-on-ai-walkthrough-2026
Context. Debois, who says earlier in the talk that his observations include Tessl, is describing developers' reaction to prompting and spec-writing and then to building harnesses; the speaker does not say which team 'we' is.
Tessl