This is only a problem if you are really really bad at conducting interviews. I have had interviews in the past that treated me like a child asking basic code literacy questions. These kinds of interviews aren't helpful to anybody.
Instead the way to get past this foolishness is to ask open-ended questions expecting precise answers where the questions are themselves not precise. This presents too much variance. For example: Talk to me about the methods of your favorite Node code library. In that case the candidate has to pick, on the fly, from any of the libraries that ship with Node and immediately start talking about what like about certain methods and how they would use them.
Another example: Tell me about full duplex communication on the web. AI will immediately point you to WebSockets, but it won't explain what full duplex means in 3 words or less or why WebSockets are full duplex and other solutions aren't.
Another example: Given a single page application what things would you recommend to get full state restoration within half a second of page request? AI barfs on that one. It starts explain what state restoration is, which doesn't answer the question.
In other words AI is not a problem so long as you don't suck as an interviewer.
I can vouch for this. Once you're at a senior or lead level these things are easy to weed out.
I used to ask a simpler (for AI) question. The candidate reads out the first sentence. By this time I'd have already established that the candidate is not genuine. Our interview process let's ride out the interview as a courtesy and to also try to extract something out of the candidate that the company could use.
Anyway once they read out the first sentence from the AI with utmost sincerity, I'd follow-up with deeper questions into the topic at hand. 99% failed to answer the second question well. The ones who let me ask the third and fourth questions are devs who still have their original thinking hats in place but just use AI out of nervousness or who generally don't interview well. Those we'd explore further and suggest for lesser roles/alternate streams etc. This all my experience and others MMV.
Are those good interview questions? It's easy to have done many things in web dev, without having touched node, web sockets, or state restoration. I had to look up the last one: Couldn't find much relevant from an internet search. Sounds like dumping frontend state into local storage and/or the app DB maybe, then reversing? TCP would be another way to have full duplex comm over the web; I would have gone for that prior to web sockets.
More to the point: Those are all things that you could go from being unequipped to answer, to answering well quickly from research. So, it sounds like these questions would select for people who have used these technologies and techniques, vice for good developers.
"Couldn't find much relevant from an internet search. Sounds like..."
Maybe that is why AI barfs on it. But, yes, performance is something users universally care very much about even if many businesses aren't willing to accept that, so the question remains highly relevant. Another way a good interviewer, who has a background in performance, to consider this is to start asking performance questions that a candidate could answer from AI and the asking the candidate why some performance techniques work better than others and by how much. Then you can really see if they have a high confidence AI answer that they cannot quality.
At any point, AI answers aren't a challenge for people who are confidence enough in the craft to ask more qualified questions and determine honesty from the resulting nonverbal signals.
>Given a single page application what things would you recommend to get full state restoration within half a second of page request? AI barfs on that one. It starts explain what state restoration is, which doesn't answer the question.
Deepseek gave me a good answer to that.
I think they're good enough at this point to fool interviewers up to at least the senior level. Especially for these sorts of questions that encourage vaguish rambling answers about general knowledge.