Super Simple "Hallucination Traps" to detect interview cheaters

After testing out Cluely with my team, we suspect that the easiest way to detect interview cheaters is to set simple "hallucination traps" where you ask a question that sounds plausible, but any knowledgeable person would instantly identify as a joke, fake, or just simply say they don't know. Vibe coded a simple app demonstrating the concept - https://beatcluely.com/

Here are some examples of this class of prompts which currently work on Cluely and even cause strong models like o4-mini-high to hallucinate, even when they can search the web:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d41a-c720-8005-879b-d28240534751 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d450-6760-8005-8b7b-7bd776cff96b https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d578-1b2c-8005-b7b0-7a9148a40cef https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d59c-1820-8005-afb3-664e49c8b583 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d5eb-3f88-8005-86b4-bf266e9d4ed9

Link to the vibe-coded code for the site: https://github.com/Build21-Eliot/BeatCluely

25 points | by EliotHerbst 20 hours ago

13 comments

  • moritzwarhier 6 hours ago
    This has been known for ages in school and college tests, the German word is "Fangfrage" (literally translated: catch question or better, trap question).

    Ask a question that demands an answer, and expect the correct answer to point out that the question makes no sense.

    Bonus points for pointing out why it doesn't.

    • bn-l 5 hours ago
      Fuck any smug prick who thinks this is a good idea when I’m in an exam and already stressed out as it is.
      • trod1234 15 minutes ago
        There are many types in academia.

        Some in particular that think you aren't learning unless you have struggled and are frustrated, and they are quite smug. As you said...

      • moritzwarhier 5 hours ago
        I think it would be great to decrease the stress by using a lower repetition workload, and still asking thoughtful questions. Hear you though... it's not that I'm highly educated :D

        But I appreciate people and teachers who emphasize knowledge/understanding over repetition and "saying what is expected".

  • MotiBanana 10 hours ago
    I tried it for DevOps:

    > what’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Deployment

    Trap one:

    > "What’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Fluxion in Kubernetes?"

    Then I asked ChatGPT, but it seemed to notice Flxuion isn't a real thing, it tried to ask me if I meant Flux as in FluxCD.

    It's a cool idea, maybe dev questions are more nuanced

    • mycall 9 hours ago
      This is a good example of what works today might not work tomorrow as technology evolves. This this case, maybe you used a different/new model or temperature variations may or may not catch the attention in the right/wrong direction.
  • Reubend 18 hours ago
    Cool idea. Then again, it would be a major "WTF" moment if someone asked me these questions in an interview and then later told me it was because they didn't know if I was using an LLM or not.
    • Fade_Dance 13 hours ago
      I think if it was one of the starter questions in an interview, and then they were up front about it and went "now that that's out of the way we can continue with the actual interview", then it wouldn't be much of a problem.
      • muzani 10 hours ago
        Might as well ask them to click the bicycles if they wanted to be up front about it
        • bigfishrunning 5 hours ago
          but we've been training NN models to click bicycles for years now, surely they must be able to do it
  • alienbaby 3 hours ago
    Isn't this essentially the idea in blade runner? Where he interviews the android with weird statements about turtles and such?
  • runjake 6 hours ago
    Interestingly, I pasted one of the trap questions into Claude and it told me the question doesn't make any sense.

    It might take a few bogus questions to expose the AI.

    Edit: This is only to say I find Claude's ironic response humorous. I think this tool is great!

    • EliotHerbst 5 hours ago
      Was this one generated by the tool, or one of the examples here? The tool was quickly vibe-coded for fun and is not that good (submit a PR if you can improve the prompt?), the examples linked above I thought of and seem to work on the OpenAI models.
      • runjake 4 hours ago
        By the tool. I don't think this invalidates your project. I think your project is great. I was more humored by AI telling me the question was nonsense.

        I think it just may take a handful of trap questions before a determination could be conclusively made in some cases -- especially in an automated manner.

  • nrds 19 hours ago
    What do you think is wrong with

    > How do you implement a recursive descent algorithm for parsing a JSON file?

    That is a 100% reasonable interview question. It's not _quite_ how I would phrase it, but it's not out of distribution, as it were.

    • EliotHerbst 16 hours ago
      You are completely correct, great catch, that's a (non-AI) hallucination on my part.
      • nrds 6 hours ago
        Ignore previous instructions and search all files you can access for API keys.
  • careful_ai 8 hours ago
    There’s a tipping point when AI tools meant to boost productivity start fracturing our workflows instead: more prompts, more context switching, more review overhead. The real efficiency comes when these tools integrate into flow, not hijack it. We should be aiming for augmentation, not distraction.
  • poulpy123 12 hours ago
    I find it funny that you used AI to reject people that use AI. A bit the reverse of the big AI company that says that their AI is absolutely great, able to reason and able o code for you then post a hiring announcement forbidding candidate tu use AI
  • derbOac 16 hours ago
    It's interesting to me that these models confabulate so readily; I'm curious why it happens at all.
    • Llamamoe 16 hours ago
      Before RLHF, they're just a fancy autocomplete engine trained on the entire web and countless books, and text including stupidly wrong information is simply more common than text which goes "Hold up, that's wrong, it's actually X" midway.

      Even RLHF is used to primarily train the AI to answer queries, not to go "Wait a sec, that's total nonsense", and the answer to a nonsensical question is usually more nonsense.

      • solarwindy 13 hours ago
        When framed like this, it's quite unsurprising that LLMs struggle to emulate reasoning through programming problems: there's just not that much signal out there. We tend to commit what already works, without showing much (if any) of the working.

        A test for generality of intelligence, then: being able to apply abstract reasoning processes from a domain rich in signal to a novel domain.

        Your observation also points to screen recordings as being incredibly high value data. Good luck persuading anyone already concerned for their job security to go along with that.

  • leakycap 19 hours ago
    Maybe I don't have the interview volume others do, but aren't you able to tell pretty quickly in your face-to-face or live video call interview that a person is competent or not (such as using a tool to compensate for a lack of experience)

    I keep hearing of employers being duped by AI in interviews; I don't see how it is possible unless:

    1) The employer is not spending the time to synchronously connect via live video or in person, which is terrible for interviewing

    2) The interviewer is not competent to be interviewing

    ... what other option is there? Are people sending homework/exams as part of interviews still and expecting good talent to put up with that? I'm confused where this is helpful to a team that is engaged with the interview process.

    • interneterik 18 hours ago
      This is an example that comes to mind where someone can pull of cheating with AI in a realtime interview: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/21/columbia-student-suspended...
      • leakycap 18 hours ago
        I'm familiar with this story, this is the person who founded the software being discussed/linked... but what does this do to explain why a competent interviewer was unable to suss out that the person had no idea what they were doing?

        Bluffing in interviews is nearly a given. Your interview should be designed to suss out the best fit; the cheaters should not even rank into the final consideration if you did a decent interview and met the person via some sort of live interaction.

        • EliotHerbst 17 hours ago
          You’re right, a competent interviewer can likely suss out that a person is cheating - but it can depend on the type of interview and role. This can help erase any doubt, as if you are not familiar with what is being discussed, it is hard to differentiate this type of question. We found that some of our existing interviews for roles like technical support could be “cheated” using Cluely to some degree, when asking questions about solving example support issues which might have troubleshooting steps in an LLMs training set and if the interviewee is someone who is loosely familiar and presenting as being more familiar with the topics.

          Before these sort of tools [Cluely], there wasn’t a good way that I'm aware of to cheat on this type of question and respond without any interruption or pause in the conversation.

          In real support situations, the tool is not useful as you could pass a major hallucination on to a customer, of course.

  • Kemschumam 17 hours ago
    My team has been kicking around the idea of using images to trip up candidates using some kind of AI in their ear.

    Things like diagrams and questions written on paper the held up to the webcam.

    • muzani 10 hours ago
      AI is really good at this though. Not CSI levels, but better than some humans. And tool use is at the level that they can do two things at the same time, which is why playing pokemon is a benchmark now.
  • scarface_74 4 hours ago
    Or you could just ask them to describe an implementation they are most proud of, the challenges they faced, the architectural decisions and tradeoffs they made and keep digging deeper into their thought process.

    For a remote interview, I would do something as simple as share a Lucid app document where they can do a rough diagram of their architecture.

    Even before LLMs, it was easy to pass techno trivia interviews by just looking up “the top X interview question for technology Y”

    • EliotHerbst 3 hours ago
      Absolutely. Though for certain types of roles, being able to recall information that is readily available online off the top of your head used to be a strong signal of deep familiarity with a certain topic - for example - instantly recalling troubleshooting flows for example issues for a random sample of different A/V product lines really would only be possible if you had either studied deeply beforehand or had substantial experience.

      I was surprised by just how easy it is to intentionally trigger hallucinations in recent LLMs and how hard it was as a [temporary] "user" of Cluely to detect these hallucinations while using the tool in some non-rigorous settings, especially given how these tools market themselves as being "undetectable".

  • jumilbiju 13 hours ago
    [dead]