Bret Taylor

"The AI-native interview", published 20 April 2026, sets out the premise: coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code move the engineer's role from "building the machine" to designing and refining it. Bret Taylor, cofounder and CEO of Sierra, rebuilt the company's engineering hiring on that basis. The old loop was two coding interviews, algorithms, system design, culture fit. The new onsite runs in three phases: the candidate leads an ideation session to pick a product (Plan), works alone for two hours with whatever AI tools they prefer (Build), then defends the product decisions and the code (Review). The coding phone screen became a system design interview. A debugging round is in pilot, where the candidate reviews a colleague's draft PR on a mid-size codebase while iterating with coding agents. Sierra hires for strengths rather than for the absence of weaknesses.

On 6 October 2026, Taylor and Clay Bavor announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard Meta and Sierra are developing with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Their starting observation: personal agents today load pages and fill forms the way a person would, which takes time and can fail. The protocol puts access in the consumer's hands and the permitted actions in the company's, over OAuth sessions, with the agent acting through the website, through APIs built on MCP and OpenAPI, or through the company's own agent.

Taylor and Bavor promised version 0.1 of the specification before the end of the month, with design workshops and a reference implementation to follow.