Gonfire is an assessment platform built around the assumption that candidates will use AI — and that the way they steer the AI is the signal worth measuring. Real codebases, every interaction captured.
A few years ago a take-home told you something. Today every candidate ships a clean PR generated mostly by an AI assistant. The PR isn't the signal anymore.
Whether the candidate carefully designed the solution or one-shot prompted the AI to write it, the PR usually looks fine. By the time you find out which it was, they're three months in.
Inverting a binary tree never told you whether someone could design. Now that the actual job is "give the AI clear, well-structured context and review what comes back," whiteboards are even further from real work than they used to be.
How a candidate plans before prompting. Where they push back when the AI does the wrong thing. When they revert and try a different angle. None of this shows up in the final PR.
Gonfire isn't trying to replace your entire interview loop — culture and team-fit interviews still belong on the calendar. We're trying to replace the part where you stare at a take-home PR and try to guess what the candidate actually did.
We don't try to label individual lines as "human-written" vs. "AI-written." The candidate uses AI for the whole thing — that's the point. The label that matters is behavioral: which prompt led to which decision, where the candidate took the time to read the AI's output, and where they accepted it without review.
| Today's take-home | Gonfire | |
|---|---|---|
| What candidates work on | Whatever you set up | A repo or zip you specify |
| AI tools used | Whatever the candidate uses, invisible to you | Captured end-to-end |
| What you review | Output PR | Full assessment + final submission |
| What you learn about process | Inferred from commit history, if you're lucky | Observed directly |
| Reviewer time | 2+ hours staring at a diff | ~30 minutes reviewing the assessment |
| Setup cost for you | High — env, prompt, rubric, evaluation criteria | Low — paste a repo URL, write a brief |
| Setup cost for candidate | High — local environment, dependency hell | Low — minimal setup required |
We don't position against HackerRank or CodeSignal — those platforms try to prevent AI use, which is the opposite of our approach.
Quotes here as we hear from them. If you'd like to try Gonfire on a real role and tell us what's broken, reach out.
Gonfire is in early access. We're calibrating the product with a small set of design partners before publishing pricing. If you want to use it on a real role, get in touch — we'll set up an account and walk you through it.
The starter source can be any GitHub repo or zip. We've tested with TypeScript, Python, Rust, and Go.
Yes. The candidate setup page explicitly states that their AI interactions will be recorded and evaluated as part of the assessment. There's no covert capture.
Not yet. Custom rubrics are on the roadmap.
Reach out and we'll walk you through one. We're admin-provisioning accounts for design partners.
We're working with a few teams at a time. If you have a role open and a take-home you're tired of grading, we'd like to talk.
Early access · we respond within a day.