Stop Trying to Spot AI Cheating. Design Interviews That Expose Shallow Understanding

The reliable way to deal with AI-assisted cheating in an interview is not to prove that somebody used AI. It is to collect enough evidence that they can do the job: probe a specific decision, watch them work through a real problem, change a constraint, and ask them to test their own answer. Eye contact, pause length and pasted code are weak signals that even trained interviewers get wrong most of the time. Interview design is the actual defense.[1] I have been on the candidate side of the table for most of my career. Lately I am on the other side, and the game has changed. I wrote a short TIL on one of these tricks (a candidate running an LLM on a phone just off-camera) and got a couple of DMs asking how to take precautions. I spent a couple of weeks digging in, comparing notes with other interviewers, and being honest with myself about which of my “tells” actually hold up. This post is the long answer. What actually happened, and what I can and can’t prove In one recent panel, a…