HackerRank has made Chakra, an AI agent that conducts technical job interviews, generally available to customers. The launch, reported on October 5, follows about six months of beta testing in which the agent ran more than 500,000 interviews, with Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini among the early testers.

Chakra puts candidates in a live development environment with a real code repository and a real-world problem to solve. While the candidate works, the agent watches, asks follow-up questions about their choices and then delivers a score plus a narrative of the candidate’s reasoning. Candidates are allowed to use AI tools during the session.

The pitch is to evaluate how candidates think rather than just what they produce. Co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that since AI can produce working code, interviews must assess problem-solving and what he calls AI fluency: how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output and steers it to a solution. Suspicious-activity flags were 70 to 80 per cent lower than in traditional tests.