[foreigner]

How about instead of a contrived take-home project or doing unpaid "real work" for the company, we ask candidates to do n hours of work on an open source project?

That's real useful work, if we don't hire them they can show it off to a different hiring company, and it makes the world a better place.

[IshKebab]

Not a bad idea but the problem with real work is that you can't make it fair. You can't give everyone the same bit of real work to do. Homework problems are fine. You can make them non-contrived quite easily.

The problem with homework problems now is AI. But I think it would be quite easy to detect if someone just fed it in to Claude when you go through the code with them.