Is LeetCode still relevant in the age of AI?
I've been employed in tech for over twenty years now, and for the fifth time I find myself in the position of seeking a new job. In my career I've had a lot of titles. I've been a "Programmer", a "Web Developer", a "Lead Backend Engineer", a "Staff Software Engineer", an "Engineering Manager", and a "Director of Software Development". In all of these roles, I've either been writing a lot of code, or I've been responsible for a large codebase. When I interviewed for all of these roles, I had to go through several rounds of coding interviews. So when preparing to interview, I spent a lot of time on LeetCode.
As any programmer can tell you, LeetCode is a platform for practicing the type of problems that frequently appear on coding interviews. In fact, you can practice for almost any question you will get on a coding interview on LeetCode. If LeetCode doesn't have the exact problem in its database, then it will have an analogous problem that can be solved in the same way.
As I enter another round of interviews in 2026, I find myself wondering if LeetCode remains as relevant today as it was in the past. Are these types of coding questions still relevant to programming when AI is going to be writing so much of the code? Does it still matter if I know all the different search algorithms? Does it matter if I have an encyclopedic knowledge of data structures?
The changing expectations for software developers
Whether you like it or not, the expectations placed on a software developer are changing. The people in those roles today are not doing the same thing that they were ten years ago, or even five years ago. What they will be doing five years from now is even less clear, but based on my experience at both startups and in big tech, I can see a few trends emerging.
More speed. More volume. More code.
By incorporating new AI models into developer workflows, developers are expected to produce more code faster. This means both writing more code, AND reviewing more code.
In the four years at my most recent job, the expectations for writing code more than doubled. When I started there, developers were expected to submit around two pull requests (aka diffs) per week. When I left, developers were expected to submit more than one pull request (diff) per day.
A similar thing occurred with code reviews. When I started there in 2022, we were expected to merge (aka land) our pull requests in a timely mannger. When I left in 2026, we were expected to review hundreds of pull requests (diffs) per quarter.
Participation in all aspects of software development
Developers are also expected to be able to spend more time doing things other than writing code. Because the AI is freeing up time we would have spent understanding a codebase, we are expected to invest that time into other aspects of development, such as planning, design, and analysis of the resulting work.
It's expected that most software developers today can contribute to all stages of software development. This means understanding how to use visual design tools such as Figma and Adobe products, but it also means understanding how to measure the success of your work using analytics and basic statistical tools such as A/B testing.
During my time in big tech, it was expected that I could quantitatively show the revenue impact of my work by setting up and running experiments. I had to discover the project, push the design process, write the code, run the experiment, then present the results to my peers and defend the value of the work.
Not all companies may be as demanding as big tech, but all programmers are expected to have some skills beyond just the ability to write code in 2026.
How does LeetCode help developers in 2026?
Amidst all this change, it's reasonable to ask whether a website that helps developers break down problems quickly and regurgitate known solutions is still valuable. I think that LeetCode is still valuable because it helps with two big problems facing software developers today: getting the job, and maintaining a high bar for software quality.
LeetCode helps you get the job
The fact remains that coding interviews are a prerequisite to doing the the job. You will never get the opportunity to write code using the newest AI models if you can't pass the coding interviews. LeetCode is still one of the best ways to prepare for coding interviews that aren't going away any time soon.
LeetCode helps you apply and recognize data structures and algorithms in real world situations
Despite all this change, the core problem of software development is still the same thing that it has always been: maintaining complexity.
The hard part of software development has never been the writing of the code. The hard part of software development has always been writing the code in such a way that future development and maintenance of the product is still feasible.
The challenge of integrating AI into software development is that it allows developers to write code much faster, but it also allows them to make mistakes much faster. This means that being able to recognize non-scalable patterns, inefficient data structures, and slow algorithms is critically important.
After all, when you are expected to review hundreds of pull requests per quarter, you have to learn to spot the things that will harm software development in the future.
By offering many different toy problems, LeetCode trains developers to see the things that might slow them down in the future. LeetCode trains developers to have algorithmic fluency. It trains them to see the similar algorithms and data structures that underlie problems that may appear quite different on the surface.
So I'm going to keep on training on LeetCode.