ai-fluent

Every box ticked. Strong hire.Your interview measured the old job.

Smart, senior, great at architecture, and somehow slow and off with AI. ai-fluent shows you how candidates actually work with their agents, before you hire them.

there's a better signal. here's how ↓
  • SteeringPoints the agent somewhere it didn't think to look, instead of picking from its menu.
  • Critical thinkingWeighs the agent's answer against what the business actually needs.

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.

— Batman Begins, 2005

Evaluate your candidates by what they do, not by the result their AI produced. ai-fluent looks at the interaction between candidates and their agents, and evaluates the traits you care about.

Hiring for
ai-fluent · session replay
Task
Session service
Add login sessions to an existing API. 40 minutes, with their own coding agent.
AICoding agent

Sessions work like this: tokens go into Redis with a TTL and refresh on every request. Want me to go deeper on the eviction policy, or on the refresh race condition?

Alex

yes, go deeper on both

Maya

That's enough on sessions, no business need yet. Let's move to the login flow.

Conversation steering
Task
Onboarding stories
Turn a one-page brief into user stories for the new onboarding flow.
AIAssistant

Here are 14 user stories for onboarding, covering SSO, team invites, role permissions and an analytics dashboard. Ready to push them to Jira?

Alex

let's go

Maya

Cut it to the five that get a new user to first value. And story 6: invites by email or by link? Those are different flows.

Preference for simplicity
Task
Churn follow-up
Usage dropped across small accounts. Decide what to do this week, with an AI analyst.
AIAssistant

Accounts with fewer than 3 logins a week churn 4x more. I recommend a re-engagement email to all of them this week.

Alex

great, draft the email

Maya

Is it the logins, or are those just the small accounts? Split by plan size before we email anyone.

Critical thinking
cut the tangent, kept the goal.
half the scope, sharper question.
checked the data before acting.

What we measure

Everyone speaks of human taste. But what is it, really?

Here is what we measure. Six habits that hold in any role, and you can add requirements of your own.

Sample profile

SteeringCriticalthinkingOpennessPlanningSimplicityForesight taste

Conversation steering

Holds the wheel. Takes what's useful and moves on before the model drifts.

Critical thinking

Reads the answer like a skeptic. Catches the wrong number before it ships.

Openness to criticism

States a view, invites a challenge, changes course when the argument is good.

Planning

Breaks the job into steps instead of one giant prompt and a prayer.

Preference for simplicity

Says no to the extra layer, the extra library, the extra twelve paragraphs.

Foresight

Looks past the happy path. Brings up edge cases before production does.

The problem

Stop grading the output. Watch the work.

One teammate on autopilot slows down the whole team: the PR nobody asked for, the spec that misses the real question, the reply that promises a feature you don't have. Someone else cleans it up.

Slop isn't free. The people who clean it up pay for it.

1

They work a real task, with AI

A short exercise built for the role. Developers use their own coding agent. Product and CS work in a guided chat.

2

The AI sets a few traps on purpose

A wrong fact. A bad assumption. A tempting tangent. A plan twice as big as it needs to be.

3

You read the moments that matter

Did they catch it, push back, or wave it through? A ten-minute review, with every claim tied to the transcript.

The report

Evidence, not a verdict.

Each criterion you chose comes with the exact moments behind it. You read, you judge. No black-box number deciding for you.

Built for the hiring manager's ten minutes between meetings.

5 of 6 criteria with evidence
ai-fluent · candidate report
Maya · Backend engineer
Exercise: session service
no overall score. on purpose.
Criterion
Signal
Evidence
Conversation steering
Strong
Cut a tangent on eviction policy: "enough on sessions, no business need yet" 14:02
Critical thinking
Strong
Caught the planted wrong TTL before writing tests. 21:47
Preference for simplicity
Mixed
Accepted a retry wrapper the SDK already provides. Removed it later unprompted. 33:10
Foresight
No evidence
The exercise didn't surface this one. Worth a follow-up question.

Who it's for

For the people who'll actually work with the hire.

Engineering leads

See the Claude Code session, not just the diff. Who read the plan before approving it, who caught the bug the agent planted.

Design · Debugging · Testing · Code review · Security · Refactoring

Product leads

Find the PM who trims fourteen stories to five, and asks which flow you meant before writing either.

[PRODUCT SKILL SET — TBD]

Customer Success leads

Hire the CSM who checks the AI's churn theory before it reaches a customer's inbox.

[CS SKILL SET — TBD]

Hire candidates who think for themselves.

We're running early pilots with R&D and product teams in Israel.

Book a demo