Claude Code developer interview questions: what to ask and what good answers sound like

The best interview questions for a developer who uses Claude Code ask them to show how they control and check the tool, not how fast it makes them. You want to hear about git branches, plan mode, permission settings, secrets kept out of reach, and a person reading every diff before anything ships. A candidate who talks mostly about speed and very little about review is telling you how they will treat your site.

This guide is for hiring an individual: an employee, a contractor or a freelancer. It gives you questions grouped by topic, what a good answer includes, a short practical exercise you can run on a copy of your site, and the answers that should end the conversation. If you are comparing firms rather than people, our guide on how to choose a Claude Code development partner has 15 questions for agencies, and many of them work for individuals too.

You don't need to be technical to use these questions. Most good answers are plain-language descriptions of a process. If a candidate can't explain their process to you simply, that is useful information in itself.

Before the interview: know what you are hiring for

Write down three things first. What will this person actually do with Claude Code (site changes, a rebuild, internal tools, SEO fixes)? Who on your side will review their work? And what systems will they touch, such as your CMS, hosting, analytics or customer data? The answers decide which questions matter most. A developer who will work alone on your live store needs stronger answers on access and rollback than one who will hand every change to your own reviewer.

If you haven't decided whether you need a person, a firm or an employee, read our comparison of agency vs freelancer vs in-house developer first.

Workflow questions

The last question matters most. Everyone who uses Claude Code seriously has a story about a change that looked right and wasn't. When we rebuilt eseospace.com, one script replaced the wrong container, so new posts carried the template post's text; the lesson was to check the second page a script produces, not just the first. A candidate with no such story either hasn't used the tool much or hasn't been checking.

Permission and safety questions

Claude Code has several permission modes, which decide what it can do without asking. Anthropic's permission modes documentation lists them, from Manual mode (default), where only reads happen without asking, through modes that accept edits, plan only or allow only pre-approved tools, to auto mode, where a separate classifier model reviews actions, and bypassPermissions, which is for isolated containers and VMs only. Recent versions can start terminal sessions in auto mode, so ask which mode a candidate's sessions start in. Our guide to every permission mode explains each one.

On rewind, Anthropic's checkpointing docs say checkpoints don't track files modified by Bash commands. A developer who treats rewind as a full undo button hasn't read them.

Secrets and data questions

• "Where do API keys and passwords live on your projects?" Listen for environment variables or a password manager or vault, plus deny rules. Never "I paste it into the prompt so Claude can use it."
• "Whose Claude account would you use for our work?" A clear answer, and a willingness to use a seat on your own plan if you prefer. This matters for data terms: Anthropic's data usage page says it doesn't train on code or prompts sent under commercial terms (Team, Enterprise, API) unless the customer opts in, while Free, Pro and Max accounts follow a user setting.
• "What would you do if a file you were working on contained customer data?" Stop, tell you, and keep that data out of the session.

Our guide to keeping secrets away from Claude Code covers the setup a good candidate should describe.

Review and judgment questions

These questions test whether the person still thinks like an engineer when the tool writes most of the code.

1. "How do you review a diff Claude Code produced?" They read it line by line, run the check, and look at the result in a browser for front-end work. "Claude checks its own work" is not an answer.
2. "When would you not use Claude Code?" Real limits: a two-line fix that is faster by hand, changes that exist only in a live admin screen, or work where the facts can't be checked.
3. "Who decides prices, claims and business facts in content you edit?" You do. They check facts against your sources and flag anything they can't confirm.
4. "What do you do before you deploy?" Check git history for changes they didn't make. On our own site, one session once regenerated pages another session had just edited, and the edits disappeared.

If you'll be reviewing their work yourself, our guide on reviewing a diff when you aren't a developer shows what to look for.

A practical exercise beats any answer

Pay the candidate for a short, real task on a staging copy of your site. Keep it low risk and checkable. Good options:

• Find and fix broken internal links in one section of the site.
• Write a CLAUDE.md and shared permission settings for your repository, with a short explanation of each rule.
• Correct the structured data on one page template and show the before and after.

Give them access only to a test copy of your repository, where they can push a branch and open a pull request, and to the staging site. Nothing in production. Then judge the work with this table.

Answers that should end the interview

• A promise of a fixed speed-up, guaranteed savings or "bug-free" code.
• Running without permission prompts on live sites or with production credentials.
• No git, or editing live files directly with no history.
• Asking you to email or paste passwords and keys.
• No example of a mistake they caught.
• Claims of being "Anthropic certified" that they can't back with a badge link. Anthropic's certifications are individual Credly badges, valid for 12 months, and open to people who work at Partner Network member organizations.

The last point cuts both ways. A candidate who doesn't work at a member organization can't register for those exams, so a missing badge is normal. A claimed badge, though, should be checkable.

After the interview

Before you make an offer, agree in writing on whose accounts and repositories the work lives in, what access they get first, and who approves deploys. Our onboarding checklist lists the access to give and hold back, and the guide on choosing the right AI developer for a SaaS project covers hiring for software products.

Conclusion

A good Claude Code developer can show you their process in plain language: branches, plans, permission settings, secrets out of reach, a check that can fail and a person approving what ships. Ask them to walk through a real change, ask about a mistake, and pay for a small task on staging before you commit. If you'd rather hire a team that works this way for builds and migrations, see our Claude Code development service and ask us the same questions. More guides are in our Claude Code Guide.

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