"Make your coding assistant a task master — not your teacher."
I was interviewing a test automation candidate. She opened with the usual: "I do UI and API automation, and I use Copilot to speed things up." Great.
Then I asked a small string problem. She began writing code, but couldn't think of the logic — and most of the syntax and libraries she had already forgotten. We don't judge on syntax; logic is what we look for. Even after a hint, she hesitated.
The automation assistant she used was never at fault. The gap was fundamentals.
What's Happening
Immediacy hides a problem
Tools like Copilot, Claude and GPT are seductive: they give immediate, usable code and make you feel productive. But that same immediacy can hide a problem.
When people skip learning the basics — escaping strings, execution flow, debugging, framework internals — these tools simply accelerate shallow work. You produce more output faster, but you lose the ability to reason about it, diagnose it, and design for edge cases.
A coding assistant is a multiplier. It multiplies both competence and ignorance.
Why Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever
Four places the gap shows up immediately
✓Where fundamentals decide the outcome
A Small Example: Escaping Quotes
Tiny, and telling
Basic language literacy
Handling a string like: She said, "It's complicated." — this is about how strings are delimited, how escape characters work, and when to use raw literals. If you can't do this, you'll struggle to debug logs, format test data, or handle JSON payloads that include quotes. An assistant can suggest options, but it won't teach you which one is correct for your language, runtime, or context.
How to Use Copilot Correctly
The assistant executes your intent — it does not form it
Learn first, automate second
Make sure you can solve core problems without AI before you let AI solve them for you.
Use it as a task-completing agent, not a substitute for thought
Let it write boilerplate once you already understand the shape of the solution.
Always review generated code — especially tests
Don't merge without reading.
Test with realistic inputs
Edge cases, special characters, nulls. Generated code is rarely robust out of the box.
Practice debugging
Breakpoints, logging, stack traces. If you can't find the bug, the suggestions are meaningless.
Checklists
For both sides of the interview table
For interviewers
- ✓Don't be impressed by "I use Copilot" — ask for live problem solving with edge cases
- ✓Push the candidate to explain the execution flow
- ✓Probe fundamentals: string handling, async flow, error handling
- ✓Give a debugging scenario and watch how they trace it
For candidates — what to practise
- ✓Language-specific data structures, and what's new in the latest version of your language
- ✓Build tools
- ✓Strings and escaping (single/double quotes, raw literals)
- ✓Basic I/O and parsing — JSON, CSV, command-line inputs
- ✓Debugging: breakpoints, logs, stack traces, step execution
- ✓Framework internals: test runner lifecycle, setup/teardown, mocking
- ✓Flakiness sources in UI tests: timeouts, waits, selectors
- ✓API basics: status codes, headers, authentication patterns, stubbing/mocking
- ✓Reading and interpreting tool-generated code — don't accept it blindly
Conclusion
Copilot, Claude and GPT are powerful and here to stay. But they are multipliers, and what they multiply is whatever you already are.
Keep the thinking. Teach yourself to be the person who shapes the code, and let the assistant be the one that executes your intent.