Meta's AI-Enabled Coding Round: Format and Practice Plan

Meta has been testing a coding round where candidates get an AI assistant, and candidates report taking it since late 2025. Most pages about it state every detail with the same confidence. This guide splits what Meta said on the record from what candidates and prep sites report, shows where those reports disagree, and ends with a two-week plan. For how other companies set their AI rules, see our AI coding interview overview and what an AI coding round is.

AICodingRound is not affiliated with Meta. We have no copy of Meta's interview material, and none of our problems are Meta questions.

Practice the round on AICodingRound. Fix, build and speed up real multi-file apps with your own Claude or Codex in a chat-style coach role, then explain your change. Try A wholesale customer's big order fails at checkout (easy, about 30 min). The beta is free and places are limited: get a place.

What Meta confirmed

Very little has come from Meta in public, and everything we found dates from July 2025.

On July 29, 2025, 404 Media reported that Meta told employees some coding candidates would be allowed to use an AI assistant, and asked employees to volunteer for mock AI-enabled interviews (404 Media). Business Insider reported the same day from Meta's internal post, which said: "Meta is developing a new type of coding interview in which candidates have access to an AI assistant." The post gave two reasons. The format "is more representative of the developer environment that our future employees will work in," and it "makes LLM-based cheating less effective." It also said: "The questions are still in development" (Business Insider via AOL).

A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider: "We're obviously focused on using AI to help engineers with their day-to-day work, so it should be no surprise that we're testing how to provide these tools to applicants during interviews." And: "Humans talking to humans will always be part of the interview process, that remains unchanged."

That is the confirmed part. We found no Meta careers page that describes the round. interviewing.io says Meta's own prep material calls AI use in the round "optional" with "no bearing on the outcome," but it does not link that material, so treat it as reported (interviewing.io).

What candidates and prep sites report

Everything in this table is reported, not confirmed by Meta.

Two notes on the sources. Hello Interview's guide is written by a co-founder who is a former Meta staff engineer, and it is undated. Prepfully's guide shows "Updated: Nov 2025". The interviewing.io post shows no date either.

Where the reports conflict

The reports disagree on three things that matter for your prep.

None of these sources is Meta. The safe reading: the round exists, it has been reported from E4 up to E7, and it may not be in every loop. Ask your recruiter whether your loop has it and which round it is.

What the problems are reported to look like

Here the reports point in a direction worth noticing. Hello Interview lists reported problems such as a maze solver that prints the path, a card game that finds three cards summing to 15, and a friend recommendation system, and it cites an internal estimate of about nine problems in the pool (Hello Interview). Those are puzzle-like.

Yet the skills the round scores are production skills. Hello Interview quotes lines it attributes to an internal source on how candidates are judged: "Should use AI, but need to show you understand the code." "Explain the output. Test before using." "Don't prompt your way out of it." interviewing.io's advice points the same way: plan without the AI first, use it for specific tasks, and keep the last minutes for testing and review (interviewing.io).

So the round looks like a classic algorithm problem dressed as a small codebase, scored on how you read, verify and explain. Practice both halves.

What the chat-only rule changes

If the reports are right that the assistant cannot edit files, three things follow.

1. You type or paste every change. Nothing lands in the code unless you put it there, so you own every line by default.
2. Context is on you. The assistant reportedly sees the project, but it does not know which part you are working on unless you say so. Short, specific questions get better answers than "solve this."
3. Copy-paste errors become your errors. Pasting a whole function over yours can silently drop an edge case you already handled. Read the diff in your head before you run it.

A two-week practice plan

This is our suggestion, not a Meta rule. About an hour a day.

Week 1: reading and fixing.

• Days 1 to 2: open a small multi-file project you have never seen. Before writing anything, write three sentences on how a request flows through it. Then run the tests.
• Days 3 to 4: bug hunts from a symptom. Reproduce, find the cause, fix it, run the whole suite. Use the AI only to explain code, and check one claim per answer.
• Day 5: one classic algorithm problem (BFS or backtracking, since mazes are reported) with no AI, timed.
• Days 6 to 7: one hour, three phases, on one codebase: fix a bug, add a small feature, make one path faster.

Week 2: the full round.

• Days 8 to 10: 60-minute runs with a chat assistant. Plan without AI for the first five minutes, then hand it small, well-defined pieces.
• Days 11 to 12: speed-up work. Measure first, change one thing, measure again.
• Days 13 to 14: rehearse out loud. After each run, explain in two minutes what you changed, how you checked it, and one thing the AI got wrong.

LinkedIn's version (reported)

Hello Interview reports that LinkedIn also has an AI-enabled round on its onsite loop. It "replaces one of the traditional coding rounds," runs on CoderPad, and the assistant sits in a chat panel where "it can't directly modify your code." The author says he has talked to candidates "at both senior and Staff levels." The problems are described as "familiar patterns. LRU caches, interval merging, frequency-based eviction, data transformation," and the flow is a working solution first, then follow-ups on production readiness (Hello Interview). That is one prep site, undated, with no length given. We found no LinkedIn statement about the round.

Practice Meta's round on AICodingRound

AICodingRound is built for this kind of round. Five problems from our library map onto the reported phases. They are business apps (a shop, room bookings, invoicing), not puzzles, so they train the reading, checking and explaining the round scores.

• Fix: A wholesale customer's big order fails at checkout (easy, TypeScript, about 30 min).
• Fix: Promo codes page errors after marketing adds a new code (medium, TypeScript, about 40 min).
• Build: Book a room every week (medium, Python, about 45 min). A feature from a written request.
• Speed up: The invoice list takes seconds to load (easy, Python and Postgres, about 25 min).
• Warm-up: Invoice lines don't add up to the subtotal (easy, Python, about 10 min).

You bring your own Claude or Codex as a coach: it reads code and explains, but it does not write the fix, so you type every change yourself, as in Meta's reported chat-only panel. When you submit, tests check your change and that nothing else broke, and a short debrief asks you to explain it. The report gives a level per skill (Strong, Solid or Developing), including how you used the AI. Keep a classic algorithm problem in your week for the other round; we have no algorithm problems.

Run the two-week plan on these five. The beta is free and places are limited: get a place.