Is LeetCode Still Worth It in 2026?

Yes, if you’re interviewing at companies that ask algorithm questions. How much time to spend on it depends on the rounds you’ll face. Check those before committing to another hundred problems.

What changed

AI tools can produce solutions to LeetCode-style problems, including during a remote interview. A correct answer alone doesn’t tell an interviewer whether you understand the code. Companies have responded in different ways.

Google went back toward in-person interviews. In 2025 its CEO, Sundar Pichai, said the company would add at least one in-person round to make sure candidates have the fundamentals.

Others went the opposite way and let you use AI. Canva announced in June 2025 that it expects candidates to use AI tools in technical interviews, and in July 2025 Meta confirmed it was testing a coding round where the candidate has an AI assistant. The problems in these rounds are bigger and closer to real work than a LeetCode question.

Expect follow-up questions too. An interviewer may ask you to explain your solution, change it or handle an edge case to check that you understand what you wrote.

What didn’t change

Candidates at Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Apple still report data structure and algorithm questions in phone screens and onsite interviews. Many companies still send a timed online assessment before anyone talks to you.

Canva says its AI-assisted round continues to assess computer science fundamentals. You still need data structures and complexity analysis to judge whether generated code is correct or fast enough.

How much you need

For new graduates and interns applying to large tech companies, algorithm practice can take up much of the preparation. Mid-level engineers may still face several coding rounds. At senior and staff levels, leave enough time for system design and behavioral preparation too; those rounds help determine the level you’re offered.

Startups and smaller companies lean on it less. Many prefer practical tasks like building a small feature, debugging or a take-home project, though easy and medium problems still show up.

If you don’t know what a company’s coding rounds look like, ask the recruiter. Most will tell you.

How to practice now

Do fewer problems and know them properly. A memorized solution won’t help much when the interviewer changes a constraint and asks you to adapt it. Work through a list such as Blind 75 or NeetCode 150, and check that you can solve each problem again a week later without looking.

Most problems come from a small set of techniques, so learn when each one applies:

• hash maps and sets
• two pointers and sliding window
• binary search
• stacks and queues
• linked lists
• tree and graph traversal with BFS and DFS
• heaps
• backtracking
• basic dynamic programming
• sorting and intervals

Hard dynamic programming and rare tricks come up far less often. Leave them until the list above is comfortable.

Talk while you solve. Say your approach before you write code, give the time and space complexity, and walk through an example by hand. Record yourself or practice with a friend to find the parts you struggle to explain.

After each problem, ask yourself what the interviewer would ask next. Can the complexity be better? What about empty input, duplicates, or input too large for memory? How would you test it?

Turn the AI autocomplete off for some of your sessions. If you use it all day at work, writing a loop from memory can feel slow, and in-person rounds and many shared editors give you no help at all.

Using AI to practice

Use it as a tutor. Try the problem yourself first. If you’re still stuck after 20 or 30 minutes, ask for a hint and keep going without the full solution. When you’re done, ask it to review your code, point out edge cases you missed and show you another approach.

If you read a full solution, close it and try writing the code yourself. That’s how you check whether you can use what you read.

Make room for the other rounds

Practice reading and changing code you didn’t write, since practical and AI-assisted rounds often start from an unfamiliar codebase. If a company you’re targeting runs an AI-assisted round, practice giving an AI tool small tasks and reviewing what it writes. Put more into system design the more senior you are. And prepare your behavioral stories as carefully as your algorithms.