In this case the candidate chose to use a language that I don’t know well and they said they weren’t especially familiar with either. Then they struggled a lot to even talk through the question and it was a grind to work through each line of code. I couldn’t offer much help, and they were very clearly unsure at each step.

But when we clicked “run” on the code, we were both surprised to see that it ran on the first try. Not only that, but it already worked for all of the “but what about…” follow up edge cases. And the candidate didn’t know why… “oh, I guess the language just works that way.”

I don’t know if they were cheating, but the entire thing was far outside any other interview experience I’ve ever had — and fits the pattern of what I’d expect an LLM to produce.