[prateeksi]

We're building a CLOB-based DEX and this problem hits close, we've interviewed a lot of smart contract developers where AI makes it nearly impossible to assess real understanding. What we've shifted to: giving candidates a live matching engine with a subtle bug in the order execution logic and asking them to find and fix it. Prompting Claude gives you something that looks right but breaks under edge cases, partial fills, price-time priority violations, self-trade prevention. The candidates who actually understand the mechanics catch it. The ones steering AI without real knowledge submit a fix that breaks three other things. Your "AI steering" framing is exactly right. The real skill now is knowing when the output is plausible but wrong and that only comes from genuine domain knowledge.