Software engineers are saying LeetCode is dying, but what is LeetCode and is it really going away?

Published 7 August 2026 · tech

For years, if you wanted to get a job as a software engineer, people would tell you to memorise LeetCode. LeetCode is a platform that

For years, if you wanted to get a job as a software engineer, people would tell you to memorise LeetCode. LeetCode is a platform that has thousands of coding problems, ranging from easy to more complex ones. Over time, it has become the perfect place for candidates to brush up their skills before going for an interview. But with the rise of AI tools, it seems that companies are moving away from LeetCode-based questions. Read Full Story On the subreddit leetcode, a user, who goes by the name Fabulous-Arrival-834, wrote a post labelled, “Leetcode is slowly dying and that’s a good thing.” Is LeetCode dying? The user explained that they tried to understand the impact of AI on the hiring process for software roles, and whether LeetCode remained relevant. “To my surprise, 4 (out of 6 companies) are not doing Leetcode-styled interviews anymore,” the person wrote. That is, companies which usually stuck to a LeetCode based interview, were now focusing on more technical problems. The person added, “They have switched to technical challenges that are closer to a SWE's day-to-day work!!” A user claimed on Reddit that LeetCode was going away. The challenges, the user said, were difficult but more interesting than standard algorithm rounds. All of these were one-hour interviews, the user wrote, adding that the interviewers behaved more like co-workers.

Calling the experience "really refreshing,” the person argued that LeetCode would become irrelevant soon, especially as AI had, in their view, further reduced the value of such interviews because "candidates [are] cheating all the time.” A separate post on X claimed that a candidate had received an L4 SWE role at Anthropic without having to solve LeetCode-based problems. The post added, “This is because top AI companies no longer care about algorithm memorisation.” That is, a major startup like Anthropic seems to have given no weightage to a person’s LeetCode skills when it came to hiring them for the role. A person on X says that Anthropic may have stopped giving weightage to LeetCode too. But is it actually being phased out? Deepak Kumar Gour, associate director at Newton School of Technology, and former Google software engineer says that companies aren’t completely abandoning LeetCode just yet. “What we are seeing is a shift from treating it as the definitive measure of engineering ability to using it as one part of a broader assessment,” he tells India Today Tech. Deepak explained that while LeetCode-style interviews were designed to test problem-solving skills of candidates, its widespread use had turned into a problem. He adds, “The problem is that candidates have become extremely good at recognising and memorising recurring patterns.