Rethinking coding assessment in an AI-assisted world Marina VisintiniMaria JonesAnkriti Singh April 08, 2026 This page in: English © 2026 World Bank Group,

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/rethinking-coding-assessment-in-an-ai-assisted-world AI tools are transforming the production function for economics research, and rapidly changing both the skills required of a research assistant and how we assess those skills when hiring. At the World Bank's Development Impact department, objective assessment of coding skills is an essential part of the hiring process. We have traditionally relied on take-home coding tests in Stata or R: applicants are provided a dataset and assignment and given a set number of hours to return their code and outputs. For a long time, successfully completing the test and producing clear, reproducible, functional code served as a reasonable proxy for technical competence. © 2026 World Bank Group,