How do founders hire engineers now that AI writes the code?
Short answer
The signals that used to sort candidates — a résumé, a take-home, a clean repo — are all cheap to generate now, so they sort nothing. What survives is evidence of reasoning on real work over time: what someone decided, what they got wrong, and what changed their mind. You read it directly instead of inferring it.
How it works
What broke
Every screening artefact became generatable.
résumé, cover letter, take-home, portfolio
↓
What did not
A dated record of decisions on real work.
hard to fake across weeks, and boring to fake
↓
How you read it
Five entries tells you how someone handles being wrong.
which no interview reliably surfaces
↓
Then interview
The record decides who is worth an hour.
it does not replace the conversation
Filter, then guess→Read, then talk
On Proof today
4,100+
logs written
900+
engineers writing them
Counted live, and excluding one account that flooded the platform with automated rows in July–August 2026. Every public number on Proof excludes it.
What this does not do
This narrows who you talk to. It does not tell you whether to hire someone — that is still your judgement, and Proof will not make the call for you.
Has this actually worked for anyone? One hire, every step, with the denominator — including what it does not prove.
Related questions
Published
September 2026
Made by
Radhakrishnan Selvaraj
Candor and Innovation
PROOF.ZEROMAINTENANCEENGINEER.IN