How AI Coding Startups Are Redefining Hiring

AI coding startups like Cursor, Cognition, Base44, and Replit are reshaping talent hunts by courting engineers directly (not via portals), discarding traditional résumés in favor of social signals and online projects, replacing multiple on-sites with multi-day work trials and bootcamps, probing for founder-like ownership in interviews (token usage, 5-year plans, and hypothetical CEO moves), and embracing AI tools in the hiring process to push candidates to build and ship during interviews—all as competition for top engineers intensifies.