#careers

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Hiring engineers when everyone has an agent

Our take-home test stopped working in the autumn. Every submission was clean, tested and about the same as the others, because every candidate had used the same tools and the test was measuring the tools. We rebuilt the process around what still tells candidates apart, what they do with an agent's output. This is the loop, the exercise and what it found.

hiringengineering-practiceai-agents+1 more

Jul 14, 202610 min13 min

~/tips/today — 2026-10-19

~cat tips/today

Never build an index on a live table without CONCURRENTLY

postgresqlmigrations

A plain CREATE INDEX takes a lock that blocks every write to the table for the whole build. On a big table that means minutes of outage that look like a hung app.

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY orders_customer_idx ON orders (customer_id);

It's slower and can't run inside a transaction, so you'll have to tell your migration tool. If it fails halfway, it leaves an invalid index behind, so check pg_index.indisvalid and drop it before you retry.

↵ open y yesterday l ls /tips

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