Recall is free now

I've blanked in a technical screen before.

Not on the hard part. On the easy part. Write out a method from memory, no editor, no search, just me and a shared doc. I knew exactly what it did. I could not produce the syntax cold. I sat there feeling like a fraud.

Which is funny, because of what I do now. This spring I built an agentic AI workflow that wrote test cases in production. Real tooling, running on a release train, saving most of a work week every cycle.

The screen tested the one skill that costs nothing now. I can recall that syntax in two seconds with the tools I use every day. What it didn't test was whether I can take a problem nobody has solved and figure it out in real time. Which is the actual job. It's the thing I'm best at.

We built the interview for a world where knowing things was scarce. That world is gone. Recall is free now. Judgment isn't.

The test never got the memo.