I considered promoting that site, then checked it out. I can’t definitively prove that its written content is generated by AI, but the fact that one person produced thousands of articles seemed either impressive, or suspect. I was interested in how someone was able to achieve something like this. You can search a company, then the company query seems to surface everything from Glassdoor without attributing Glassdoor. There are lessons, practice questions…is it all just AI?
Someone noted that a Reddit account generated about ten AI comments in about an hour. Each one would respond to some random technical question, then include a link to their resource after. That seems a bit like the email I received.
CORGIS (Collection Of Really Good Interview Stuff)
Then I thought about something. The site they made is a paid resource. I was always under the impression that this kind of thing should be free, but I never practiced what I preached. I wrote a collection of Medium articles about coding interviews and coding interview concepts, but my real dream was to create a one-stop shop.
What if I had AI do it? I mean, it wouldn’t be a one-stop shop. The writing itself would be mine, though I suppose if the website itself was mostly AI slop people could be just as annoyed with it as they would be if the writing itself was also slop. It would just be a proof of concept.
I have written maybe 50 articles on Medium about this, though they are not very focused and…yes…more than a few times I cover a LeetCode easy. Sue me.
I asked Codex to scrape the Evan SooHoo and Curt Corginia Medium sites for relevant blogs. It asked if I had permission. I said yes, and it wrote custom Python scripts that allowed it to run the scrapes and dump all the results to a shitty JSON file…but what if I wasn’t actually Evan SooHoo? How many people run websites where they just prompt ChatGPT to steal content from other people? I could have just said I was Sebastian Carlos. No one, not even ThePrimeagen has ever figured out who Sebastian Carlos is. Dude is a mystery.
And then…it did it. It backlinked the Medium articles, it needed another commit to track down relevant Gists and paste that as code. Frontend stuff can be a pretty tough thing to vet. I once encountered a CSS file that was enormous, only to slowly realize almost every line of it was unnecessary. How does AI even validate its own CSS? It’s somewhat subjective, no?
I think the site it generates looks nice, but man was that a lot of CSS.
The Wall I Hit Before: Coding Playground
I mean…clearly it’s possible. LeetCode figured it out. At a Sacramento tech meetup I even encountered someone who worked at HackerRank, and I flat-out asked him what they did. Something something docker, I think?
I don’t know what it is behind the hood, but yeah….Codex did it.
JavaScript involved web workers…fine. Intuitively, it tracks that a coding playground would be easier to implement if the user chose to practice in JavaScript. But C++? I have raised a few eyebrows by going into web developer interviews with C++, but it is still the language I am most used to for coding interviews.
The Codex code leverages a library, so it’s running a pretty sizable environment locally or on GitHub pages. But yeah, it works. You can make a coding playground that works.
Closing Thoughts
Thanks, potential bot. I think you’re the result of a single person using ChatGPT bots to make money, but you have filled me with some ideas. I am just glad we are still at a point where AI writing sucks and I still have something to do, but maybe that is just cope. When I prefer AI writing to human writing, that is the day I will have an existential crisis similar to the one I had in 2023 when I saw AI rip apart coding interview questions in seconds.