I Interviewed at Almost 20 Companies. Barely Any of Them Were Really Using AI

I signed an offer last week after about two months of interviewing, close to twenty companies in total. I want to write this down while I still remember it clearly. But it’s not really about the offer. It’s about how much my thinking on “AI is going to replace programmers” changed over these two months.

Before I started, that was honestly the thing stressing me out the most. Was the skill I’d spent years building — writing code — already becoming useless?Blind, LinkedIn, every day someone posting that programmers are about to get replaced. And it wasn’t just something I was reading about either, I’d been messing around building my own little apps and tools with AI at home, and how fast you could go from idea to something actually working was kind of scary. That made the anxiety worse, not better.

But after actually going through nearly twenty interviews, I came out less worried, not more. Because it turned out almost none of the companies I talked to were really using AI to write code.

Finance and tech were the two industries that used it the most. Some of them have started adding an “AI round” to interviews, basically an hour where you have to build a small app or add a feature using AI, live. Sounds easy when you first hear it, it’s genuinely not once you’re in the seat and the clock’s running.

A few companies had clearly had an AI coding tool set up internally for over a year already, and the process for those was a lot more mature. But most companies, when I asked what they actually used, it was just Copilot doing autocomplete. Nothing more than that.

Government-related places were the slowest of everyone. Old systems, a lot of security concerns, external AI tools basically can’t get in. One interviewer told me directly that on their end AI was still “in the evaluation stage.” I asked a bunch of interviewers the same question, do you use Claude or Codex day to day, and most said no, or “we’re looking into it.” A couple of companies had banned outside AI entirely and only allowed Copilot.

Honestly it kind of surprised me. In my own environment before this, using AI to write code was already just the default, nobody even thought about it. Going through this whole round of interviews I realized most companies are still at the stage of “heard of it, haven’t used it.”

So that fear about programmers, website designers getting replaced by AI, at least here in Australia, doesn’t seem that close. Not yet. But not never either.

I was pretty shaken by all the rumours online before I started interviewing, honestly thought there might not be a spot left for me in this market anymore. After actually going through the whole thing, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. This is just my own experience though, obviously. Your mileage may vary.

Curious what it’s actually like where you work — are you using AI day to day, and how much?