Hire amazing engineers by seeing how they use AI
TL;DR: Outship is a recruiting platform that records and analyzes how engineering candidates use coding agents. Import a task repo from GitHub and send an invite link for a take home or an interview. We spin up a cloud workspace for them to work in.
⁉️ Why?
Everyone’s feeling the AGI when it comes to coding. We spoke with over 50 YC teams in the past few weeks, and almost all of them are aggressively using coding agents to build product.
This naturally means that the skills that differentiate an okay engineer from an amazing one have changed significantly! Teams are no longer hiring for typing out code character by character. Instead, they need ambitious builders who can leverage the latest tools and techniques to achieve in a day what a team of five used to achieve in a week.
- “I usually ask them which agent they are using. If it’s still Cursor, I’ll send them to the bottom of the queue” – YC founder 🤵
- “If they know the latest stuff like a Ralph loop, that’s usually a really good sign that they are passionate” – another YC founder 💁♀️
Seeing a candidate work with AI can give you a lot of signal about their thought process and whether they’re the engineer you’re looking for.
The YC application, along with several companies, now asks applicants to attach AI agent sessions:
💩 Existing hiring tools can’t capture this
Tools like CoderPad and HackerRank have tried to band-aid a “AI Agent” on their Leetcode interview platforms, but honestly, these toy environments and their crappy GPT wrappers have nothing to do with how your engineers work today.
🚀 The Solution
We’ve built a platform to send tasks to candidates and record how they work on them with coding agents. We then analyze their implementation and coding agent sessions against customizable rubrics.
Outship spins up a cloud VM and drops the candidate into a browser based VS Code workspace with coding agents ready to use. They get a real remote machine: they can use the terminal, run web apps, forward ports, and more!
We handle the environment setup and secrets management so you can evaluate candidates on a level playing field.
🦞 Our Ask
- If you are hiring engineers, try outship.ai! I will personally help you get set up. (in person in SF Bay Area or over Zoom elsewhere)
- If you want to chat more, book a meeting: cal.com/saner/outship
- If you know founders hiring engineers, we’d love an intro: saner@outship.ai
