I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time." I did this in the 4-hour window, and it was a lot of fun. Much better than many other take-home assignments.

I’ve been sent the Anthropic interview assignments a few times. I’m not a developer so I don’t bother. At least at the time they didn’t seem to have technical but not-dev screenings. Maybe they do now.

Why is writing code to execute a program using the fewest instructions possible on a virtual machine a waste of time?

It’s kind of an interesting problem.