I'm a pretty good practical programmer, good at noticing potential edge cases, writing code that's changeable without being overcomplicated. This based on feedback across years of professional work.
I also have adhd and literally brain damage and have worked professionally in about a dozen different programming languages. I can't write a for loop or declare a static method or w/e in any of them without googling the syntax or using my editor's hints & autocomplete.
They had google access and editor hints. Further, I start every interview with "please, ask any questions, we aren't trying to trick you we just want to see if you can code." And I mean it. If someone has a minor problem with remembering syntax or how to declare it I don't really care and will happily let them know how to do that.
Heck, I've even had interactions where a candidate was like "I think there's a method that does x for this" in a language I was unfamiliar with, so I googled up what x was and shared it with them mid interview. "Oh yeah, looks like this is what does x for your language".
There was also some pretty weird behaviors with the camera/screen that caused them to need to touch it fairly frequently (I'm guessing to take over keyboard control from the AI software they were using).
What they were doing, repeatedly, though the interview was writing
`a[i]` then having to change it to `a.get(i)` because they were working with a `List` in java. I get maybe doing that once or twice, but in the course of the interview they did it every single time they needed to pull something out of the list. (and each time needed to touch their screen and take a few minutes to correct it). This is why I strongly suspected cheating. It extended a question that normally takes 15 minutes to 35 minutes. Then the question I ask that usually takes ~45 minutes they completed in 15 with an optimal solution that relies on a data structure I literally only learned about because the interview hints for the question are like "Hey, java has this data structure that makes everything easier".
Yeah I get it. This is one of those things that's really hard to convincingly describe online because each individual thing is explainable eg I will write a[i] every time and my format-on-save will change it to List.get(a, i) every newline or whatever.
But you were there and I wasn't and if the overall situation seemed suspicious to you that's evidence at least as strong as any specific thing. Intuition can certainly pick up on weird behavior even if it's hard to explain how after the fact.
I also have adhd and literally brain damage and have worked professionally in about a dozen different programming languages. I can't write a for loop or declare a static method or w/e in any of them without googling the syntax or using my editor's hints & autocomplete.