Someone asked me last week whether using Craqly during an interview is cheating. I said I don’t know, and I meant it. The question has an actual answer, but the answer depends on which company you’re at, which round you’re in, and what “cheating” means in a context where companies have no consistent rules about it.
Let me try to be more useful than the usual takes on this.
What companies actually enforce
Most companies don’t have an explicit policy about AI interview tools. A handful of FAANG-adjacent firms have added “no AI assistance” language to their coding round NDAs, particularly after several high-profile incidents where candidates were caught using tools that auto-completed their code submissions. Enforcement is, to quote one hiring manager I talked to, “spotty at best.”
The enforcement that does exist is almost entirely in two places: proctored coding assessments (HackerRank, CoderPad with monitoring enabled) and roles with formal ethics requirements (certain finance, legal, and government-adjacent positions). Outside those categories, the practical reality is that most hiring teams don’t know what tools candidates are using and don’t try to find out.
That’s not an endorsement. It’s just the actual state of the industry in 2026.
The asymmetry argument is real (even if inconvenient)
The argument that gets the most traction on career forums is the asymmetry argument: companies use AI to screen candidates at scale, running resume parsers and ATS filters before a human ever sees an application. If the screening process is AI-assisted, candidates using AI assistance in the reverse direction is a symmetry, not a violation.
I find this argument more persuasive than I expected to. The 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found 76% of developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their work. The interview is supposed to evaluate performance in the job. If the job involves using AI tools, testing whether someone can do the job without them might be evaluating the wrong thing.
That said: I also think the asymmetry argument gets used to justify things it doesn’t actually justify, specifically reading AI-generated answers verbatim without processing them. That’s closer to having someone else take the interview. It’s a different situation.
Where the actual line is, in my opinion
This is the part where I’m going to say something that might be wrong.
My view: using AI to organize your thinking, surface frameworks you already know, or prevent blanking on a topic you understand is ethically equivalent to using an interview coach or flashcards. The cognitive work is still yours. You’re recalling and applying knowledge you have, with assistance structuring it under pressure.
Using AI to produce an answer you couldn’t explain or defend if asked a follow-up question is misrepresentation. It creates a gap between your interview performance and your actual capability that the hiring team will eventually discover on the job. That’s bad for everyone.
The line I’d draw: if you can’t have a coherent conversation about what the AI suggested, you shouldn’t be using that suggestion. If you can, the question of whether you surfaced it yourself or with assistance seems less important than whether you understood it.
What interview coaches get paid $200/hour to do
An interview coach who charges $200 an hour (which is the going rate for experienced tech interview coaches) will do several things in a session: help you structure STAR stories, drill you on common system design patterns, give real-time feedback on your answers, and coach you on which framing works for which company archetype. That’s $200 for maybe 3 interviews worth of prep.
The entire AI interview tool category does something structurally similar at 1/20th the price, in real time rather than in advance. The main difference is that the coach’s suggestions arrive before the interview and the tool’s suggestions arrive during. I genuinely don’t know why one is universally accepted and the other is controversial. That’s probably worth sitting with.
The practical advice if you’re deciding right now
Check the NDA or agreement you signed for this specific company’s interview process. Some coding rounds explicitly prohibit AI tools. If yours does, that decision is made for you.
If there’s no policy: consider the role. Using an AI tool to shore up behavioral answers at a company where you’d use AI tools daily in the job is a different thing than using one to fake technical knowledge in a domain you’d be expected to own independently.
The question isn’t really “is AI assistance cheating?” in the abstract. It’s “would this specific company, knowing exactly what I did, think I misrepresented myself?” That’s a more honest question, and only you can answer it for your situation.
Companies will eventually have clear policies on this. They don’t yet, and the ambiguity is genuinely confusing to navigate. Pretending there’s a clean universal answer would be more comfortable but less accurate.