Bonfire · from Cheerful Monster
Most of the market just hasn't noticed yet.
The CV, the interview, the coding test: every signal hiring relies on was weak before AI, and AI has now finished them off. Bonfire replaces them with the only signal left standing: real work, tied to reputation.
The problem
Hiring runs on proxies: the CV, the interview, the coding test. All three are failing at once, and the people who built the system are the ones saying so:
Steve Yegge spent 35 years running interviews at Amazon and Google. His verdict: the scores tell you “next to nothing”, and some star engineers failed their Google interviews four or five times. His prescription is to stop simulating the job and judge what people actually produce. This is the piece Bonfire is built on.
Steve Yegge, “The Last Technical Interview”, Medium (2026) ↗“There could be a future where they don't need junior associates anymore. Increasingly, they need only senior associates, who describe the tasks to be done.” AI is absorbing exactly the work juniors used to learn and get hired on.
Steve Yegge, “The death of the junior developer”, Sourcegraph (2024) ↗Since generative AI arrived at scale, employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most exposed occupations has fallen 16% in relative terms. Software development is one of them.
Brynjolfsson, Chandar & Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”, Stanford Digital Economy Lab (2025) ↗The tool built to cheat live coding interviews didn't get its maker blacklisted. It got him suspended from Columbia and then $5.3M in funding. Take-homes, LeetCode rounds, screening calls: all now contested territory.
“Cheat on everything”, TechCrunch (2025) ↗The fix
It is not a complicated idea. If you want to know whether someone can do the work, watch them do the work. AI didn't break that signal. It made it the only one left.
“Stop simulating. Post real pieces of work, let the candidate do it, look at what they actually produced. … Make the work count twice.”
— Steve Yegge, “The Last Technical Interview”
He called the model a campfire. We built a bonfire.
Paid client projects, delivering high-quality production code and real business outcomes.
Nothing ships without a senior shaping it and signing it off. That is the quality bar and the training both. Judgement watched for months, not simulated for an hour.
Everything lands in a portfolio the studio signs, backed by evidence and with honest assessment.
What the fire tempers
The skills that are actually scarce now.
How it works
Builders are hired or contracted into the studio, junior to senior.
Real client projects from day one, in a pod that owns the outcome.
Nothing ships without senior judgement shaping and signing it off.
Every piece of work lands in the Record: evidence, not claims.
Proven builders join hiring teams or stay on to build more.
This is a studio-backed proof engine. Builders leave with the Record: six dimensions, rated and signed, each linked to real work. See what the Record contains →
Two ways in
See months of real work before the offer, instead of a rehearsed hour after it.
See how hiring works →Paid client work, senior review on everything, and a track record with your name on it.
See how joining works →light the fire
We're starting deliberately small, on both sides. If any of this sounds like your problem, we'd love to hear it in your words.