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FDE interview prep  /  Distyl AI
Interview Track~9 min readUpdated Jul 2026
Company Loop 05

The Distyl AI
interview

Most companies are quietly anxious about candidates using AI. Distyl published its position instead: use it, and then be ready to defend everything it produced. That makes this the clearest public window into how AI-era interviewing actually works — and the anti-patterns generalise far beyond one company.

01

The published position

First-party, unusually

Distyl has published both how it runs technical interviews and how it thinks about AI-assisted interviewing.first-party2627 The core stance: AI assistance is permitted and expected, because it reflects how the work is actually done — and the evaluation shifts to judgement, verification and defence.

This is worth taking seriously beyond Distyl, because the direction of travel is obvious. When everyone can generate a plausible solution in ninety seconds, generating one stops being a signal. What remains as signal is the same thing FDE loops have always tested: did you decide the right thing, and can you defend it?

The same shift is visible on the practitioner side. Discussion at the 2026 AI Engineer World’s Fair described teams moving toward engineers writing the systems that write the feature code rather than typing it themselves.30 An interview that bans AI is testing for a job that is disappearing.

02

The three anti-patterns

Distyl names the failure modes explicitly. Each one is easy to fall into and each is visible within minutes of a defence conversation.

Autopilot

Shipping what the model produced without owning it

The code works, and you cannot explain why a particular decision was made because you did not make it. In a defence conversation this collapses instantly — every “why is it structured this way” returns a shrug.

Avoid it by: after every generated block, writing one sentence in your own words about what it does and why you kept it. If you cannot, delete it or understand it.

Default

Accepting the model’s first framing of the problem

The model proposes an approach; you build it. Nobody ever asks whether the approach was right for this customer. This is the same failure as solving before scoping — the FDE cardinal sin — wearing a new costume.

Avoid it by: writing your own scope and constraints before the first prompt. Then ask the model for two alternatives and reject one out loud, in the write-up.

Demo

Building the impressive-looking thing, not the working thing

AI makes it cheap to produce breadth: five features, a nice interface, no error handling and no tests. It looks like more work and is worth less. For a deployment role this is the exact opposite of the required instinct.

Avoid it by: one path, complete, with failures handled and a way to prove it works. Then stop.

→ The unifying rule

Use AI for generation; keep scoping, verification and judgement entirely human. Any artefact you cannot defend line by line is a liability rather than an asset, however good it looks.

03

How to run an AI-assisted take-home well

PhaseHumanAIWhy this split
ScopeEntirelyNoneWhat to build is the actual test. Outsourcing it fails the Default anti-pattern.
DesignDecideGenerate optionsAsking for three approaches and rejecting two with reasons is a strong signal, not a weak one.
ImplementReview every lineGenerate freelyThis is where AI genuinely pays. Speed here buys time for verification.
TestDecide what must be trueWrite the casesChoosing the properties to verify is judgement; typing assertions is not.
VerifyEntirelyNoneRunning it, breaking it, and confirming the failure modes is unbudgeable human work.
Write upYour own wordsNoneA generated write-up is detectable and self-defeating — it is the artefact you will be questioned on.
→ Say the quiet part out loud

In the write-up, include a short section titled “how I used AI”: what you generated, what you rejected and why, and what you verified by hand. When AI use is expected, transparency about it is a positive signal — and it pre-empts the hardest question in the defence.

04

The defence conversation

The round that decides it, and the one that AI cannot help you with in real time.

Questions to expect

  • “Why this structure and not the obvious alternative?”
  • “What happens if this call times out halfway through?”
  • “What did you decide not to build, and why?”
  • “How do you know this is correct?”
  • “Where did you use AI, and what did you reject?”
  • “What would you change with two more days?”

How to prepare for it

  • Write three trade-offs down while building — you will not remember them afterwards.
  • Deliberately break your own code before the call and know how it fails.
  • Prepare one honest weakness with the fix you would apply.
  • Rehearse a two-minute overview: problem, scope, approach, evidence.
  • Never say “the AI wrote that part” as an explanation. It is your artefact.
Rehearse the whole thing

Take-home, defence and the rounds around it

The playbook has a timed spec, a rubric and a defence checklist; the interview hub covers the other eight round archetypes.

Take-home playbook → All 9 rounds Client roleplay Question bank
Frequently asked

Quick answers

Does Distyl allow AI in interviews?

Yes — Distyl has published that AI assistance is encouraged in its take-home, because it reflects how the work is actually done. The evaluation shifts to judgement, verification and defence: you are expected to explain every decision in the artefact, including which AI-generated options you rejected and why.

What are the anti-patterns Distyl rejects?

Three. Autopilot — shipping generated code you cannot explain. Default — accepting the model’s first framing of the problem instead of scoping it yourself. Demo — building an impressive-looking breadth of features with no error handling or tests instead of one complete working path.

How should I use AI in a take-home interview?

Keep scoping, verification and the write-up entirely human; use AI freely for generating implementation and test cases, and for producing design options you then reject with reasons. Include a short “how I used AI” section in the write-up covering what you generated, what you rejected and what you verified by hand.

Is it bad to admit using AI in an interview?

Not where it is permitted, and increasingly not anywhere. When AI use is expected, transparency reads as judgement and pre-empts the hardest defence question. What fails candidates is not the use of AI but the inability to defend the result — saying “the AI wrote that part” as an explanation is the weakest possible answer, because the artefact is yours.

Receipts

Sources

Every number on this page traces to one of these. Where a figure is self-reported or crowd-sourced rather than first-party, it is labelled inline.

Cited on this page

  1. Distyl AI — “How we do technical interviews at Distyl” (first-party) — distyl.ai/blog/engineering/how-we-do-technical-interviews-at-distyl
  2. Distyl AI — “Interviewing with AI at Distyl” (first-party) — AI-assisted take-home and the anti-patterns they reject. distyl.ai/blog/frontier/interviewing-with-ai-at-distyl
  3. Latent Space — Forward deployed engineers (AI Engineer World’s Fair) — Ramp’s shift toward engineers supervising agent harnesses. www.latent.space/p/forward-deployed-engineers-aiewf
Distyl AI Interview · the interview track of the FDE course · Vibe Engines · 2026
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