Please stop the coding challenges

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about it all you want, but you aren't owed that cushy $500K/yr FAANG job. If you can't get yourself to brush up on basic programming and write some for loops then companies will simply move on to someone who will.

Even if we buy that leetcode is good in general, what about for the increasingly more dominant variant, the ML/AI engineer?

How can we even ban them using LLMs in their "ML-leetcode" problem when the problem is on LLM tokenization or something?

Like, if I lose a candidate because they're experts at using cursor + claude to do their coding (i.e. they solve it by writing 3 prompts and filling in 2 errors which are easily spotted in a total of 10 minutes), despite them having NeurIPS caliber publications and open source code, did I filter out a fake grifter, or did I filter a top tier candidate?

I just don't buy that leetcode style problems make any sense for anyone whose doing anything involving LLMs, and like it or not, increasingly large amounts of the cushy 500K/yr FAANG+ jobs will involve LLMs going forward.