{"slug": "sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode", "title": "Sorry we made you grind LeetCode", "summary": "HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar announced Chakra, an agentic interviewer that replaces algorithmic LeetCode-style questions with real work in code repositories and evaluates candidates on AI fluency and judgment rather than code correctness alone. The change shifts HackerRank's technical hiring from an IDE to an agentic development environment, where candidates use AI tools on a realistic problem and Chakra probes their approach, validation of AI-generated code, and what they would change. Ravisankar said algorithmic questions still hold value but the problem is the weightage associated with them.", "body_md": "I’m Vivek, co-founder/ceo of HackerRank. We’re sorry we made you grind leetcode. That line is on billboards around SF now.\n\nHackerRank didn’t invent algorithmic interviews, but we helped normalize a version of technical hiring that turned into months of grinding questions with little connection to the actual job.\n\nTechnical interviews have come a long way: from “How many golf balls fit in a 747?” to reading code over the phone, writing it on a whiteboard, and eventually solving LeetCode-style problems.\n\nEach step got us a little closer to the work. But we were still mostly evaluating how well someone had prepared for an interview, not how well they could build software.\n\nAI has changed that work.\n\nDevelopers increasingly plan with agents, build with them, and review their output. They need to know when the code is good, when it needs another pass, and when it’s completely wrong.\n\nThe hiring process needs to evolve too.\n\nAt HackerRank, we’re changing three things:\n\n- Tasks: Algorithmic questions → real work in code repositories\n- Evaluation: Code correctness → AI fluency and judgment\n- Candidate experience: IDE → agentic development environment\n\nWe’ve packaged this into Chakra, our agentic interviewer.\n\nCandidates get a realistic problem and access to AI tools. They solve it as they would in the real world. Chakra then digs deeper: Why did you choose that approach? What would you change? How did you validate the AI-generated code?\n\nYou can now see how well someone solved the problem and not just the output.\n\nDo algorithm questions still have value? Yes, they do but the problem is the weightage associated with them.\n\nVivek\n\nCo-founder & CEO", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode", "canonical_source": "https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/why-were-sorry", "published_at": "2026-10-12 02:52:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-12 03:07:47.051005+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["HackerRank", "Chakra", "Vivek Ravisankar", "LeetCode"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sorry-we-made-you-grind-leetcode.jsonld"}}