You call the response "cagey and evasive", but that is for an objectively a bad interview question, one wrung below "How many years experience do you have prompting Anthropic Opus? We are an Opus shop." People are not locked into their current way of using AI and it is trivial to match how one works with AI to match employers requirements. It's a question that deserves an idealized non-answer
Remember the context - this is while solving a whiteboard problem. Its bad in the same way asking candidate what their birthstone is - because any answer offer little or no signal about the odds of a candidates success at the company.
I'm curious to know why you think asking about AI usage is a good interview question.
If you're going to have people use AI regularly, it's worth asking so that you can get a sense of their interest/willingness, experience level, and training needs. That said, more specific questions are typically more revealing. Personally I'm fond of "If you could give Claude only 1 instruction, what would it be?"
You call the response "cagey and evasive", but that is for an objectively a bad interview question, one wrung below "How many years experience do you have prompting Anthropic Opus? We are an Opus shop." People are not locked into their current way of using AI and it is trivial to match how one works with AI to match employers requirements. It's a question that deserves an idealized non-answer