Blog
Writing from Promptster
Notes on AI-native technical assessment, agentic-engineer signals, and how hiring loops change when candidates work with AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
Your CLAUDE.md might be making your agent worse
Everyone has a CLAUDE.md now. Almost nobody has checked whether it helps. A 2026 ETH Zurich study found context files often reduce success and add over 20% to inference cost. Here's why config goes net-negative, what good looks like, and a free tool that audits yours.
claude.md best practicesagents.mdclaude code configai coding agent context filesclaude.md token costagents.md vs claude.mdai agent configurationclaude code skillscontext engineering 2026Why Promptster doesn't try to detect AI usage
Detection is a category mistake. The arms race is unwinnable, the question is wrong, and locking down the environment costs you the candidates you actually want. Here's what we measure instead — and why we treat AI as the environment, not the enemy.
positioningai-collaborationhiringHow to Measure AI Fluency on Your Engineering Team (2026 Guide)
90% of developers use AI coding tools. Almost no engineering org can say who uses them well. Here's why self-report and seat counts fail, what AI fluency actually consists of, and how to measure it from observed Claude Code and Cursor sessions — so training budget goes where it works.
ai fluency assessmentmeasure ai fluency engineering teamai enablement for engineering teamsclaude code training for teamsmeasure ai coding tool adoptioncopilot cursor roi measurementdeveloper ai upskilling 2026ai adoption metrics engineeringWhat Is Process Telemetry in Technical Hiring? A 2026 Primer
Process telemetry is a clear record of how a candidate worked — what they asked their AI to do, what code it produced, what they kept, what they changed, what decisions they made. Here's what the term means, why it matters now, and how it changes technical hiring.
what is process telemetryprocess telemetry definitionprocess telemetry in hiringai era technical hiringai-proof coding interviewclaude code interview assessmentai coding interview methodology 2026The Best 5 Technical Assessment Platforms (2026)
An honest comparison of Promptster, CodeSignal, HackerRank, Codility, and Alex (formerly Apriora) — the five platforms that come up when engineering leaders ask how to assess developers in the age of Claude Code.
best 5 technical assessment platforms 2026best 5 technical assessment platformsbest technical assessment platforms 2026codesignal vs hackerrank vs codilityai coding interview platforms comparisonclaude code hiring assessmentai-native technical assessmentpromptster vs codesignalalex apriora ai interview agenttechnical assessment platform comparison 2026In the path of every prompt
Promptster captures candidate workflow through two complementary surfaces: an Anthropic-API proxy that sees every prompt and response, and Claude Code hooks that capture the operational layer. Here's how it fits together — and why.
productarchitectureai-collaborationThe incumbent trap in technical assessment
CoderPad, HackerRank, CodeSignal, and Codility have all shipped AI features in the past 24 months. None of it changes what they actually measure. Here's why.
positioningmarketai-collaborationThe code is no longer the signal
LeetCode screens and take-homes measured one thing: whether a candidate could write code alone. Claude Code made that question useless. Here's what we need to measure instead — and why no existing hiring tool can.
hiringai-collaborationpositioningCodeSignal watches a screen recording. Promptster reads the event log.
CodeSignal just launched agentic coding assessments. Their own cheating page tells you why a browser IDE is the wrong surface to measure AI collaboration.
positioningcodesignalai-collaboration
Read the process,
not just the commit.
Twelve founding teams will ship this with us. A technical screen that can't tell paste from craft isn't neutral. It's a ~$200K coin-flip you won't catch for months. If you hire 5+ engineers a year, we should talk.