[steveBK123]

Agreed on that point, and my question for a lot of the AI bros has been "what would you actually do with unlimited interns who never improve much?"

For me, not much! Others may differ.

In my own experience interns are a net drag. New college hires flip positive after 3-6 months.. if they are really good. Many takes upwards of a year.

[skydhash]

> In my own experience interns are a net drag. New college hires flip positive after 3-6 months.. if they are really good. Many takes upwards of a year.

And mostly their output is not really about incorrect code, but more likely incorrect approaches. By reviewing their code, you find gaps in their knowledge which you can then correct. They're here to learn, not to produce huge amount of code. The tasks are more for practice and evaluation than things you critically need.

I don't want to work with a junior, but I'm more than happy to guide them to be someone I can work with.

[strgcmc]

I do agree that "unlimited interns who don't improve much" is less practically useful than it might seem at first, but OTOH "never improve much" seems unrealistic, given the insane progress of the field in the last 3ish years (or think back 5 years and tell me who was realistically predicting tools like Claude Code to even exist by 2025).

Also, there's a decently large subset of small startups where there's 1 technical founder and a team of contract labor, trying to build that first MVP or cranking out early features in a huge rush to stay alive, where yeah, cheap unlimited interns might actually be meaningfully useful or economically more attractive than whatever they're doing now. Founders kind of have a perverse incentive, where a CTO doesn't need to solo code the first MVP, and also doesn't need to share/hand-out equity or make early hires quittteee as early, if unlimited interns can scale that CTO's solo productivity for a bit longer than the before-times.

[lolinder]

> but OTOH "never improve much" seems unrealistic, given the insane progress of the field in the last 3ish years

The point is that no one should hire an intern or a junior because they think it will improve their team's productivity. You hire interns and juniors because there's a causal link between "I hired an intern and spent money training them" and "they joined my company full time and a year later are now productive, contributing members of the team". It's an investment in the future, not a productivity boost today.

There is no causal link between "I aggressively adopted Claude Code in 2025" and "Claude Code in 2026 functions as a full software engineer without babysitting". If I sit around and wait a year without adopting Claude Code that will have no measurable impact on Claude Code's 2026 performance, so why would I adopt it now if it's still at intern- or junior-level skill?

If we accept that Claude is a junior-level contribution then the rational move is to wait and watch for now and only adopt it in earnest if and when it uplevels.

[steveBK123]

Precisely - AI getting better or not has nothing to do with my burning cycles using it. My juniors do improve based on my effort. I can free ride on AI getting good enough later (wait) whereas I cannot with my own team of juniors.

> 1 technical founder and a team of contract labor, trying to build that first MVP or cranking out early features in a huge rush

Having worked in environments with a large number of junior contractors... this is generally a recipe for a lot of effort with resulting output that neither works technically nor actually delivers features.

[strgcmc]

To your last point -- I didn't say large number of junior contractors would write good code or whatever. The change that is happening in the startup scene now, as compared to say 10 years ago, is more about lowering the barrier to MVP and making it easier/cheaper for startups to experiment with finding product market fit, than anything to do with "productivity" or code quality or whatever.

We're probably just talking past each other, because the thing you care about is not the thing I care about. I am saying that, it used to cost some reference benchmark of $X/idea to iterate as a startup and experiment with ideas, but then it became 0.5X because gig workers or overseas contractors became more accessible and easier to work with, and now it's becoming 0.1X because of LLMs and coding agents. I am not making any sort of argument about quality being better/good/equal, nor am I making any sort of conversion chart between 10 interns or 100 LLM agents equals 1 senior engineer or something... Quality is rarely (never?) the deciding factor, when it comes to early pre-seed iteration as a startup tries to gasp and claw for something resembling traction. Cost to iterate as well as benefits of having more iterations, can be improving, even if each iteration's quality level is declining.

I'm simply saying, if I was a founder, and I had $10k to spend to test new ideas with, I can test a helluva lot more ideas today (leveraging AI), vs what I could have done 5 years ago (using contractors), vs what I could have done 10-20 years ago (hiring FTEs, just to test out ideas, is frankly kind of absurd when you think about how expensive that is). I am not saying that $10k worth of Claude Code is going to buy me a production grade super fantastic amazing robust scalable elegant architecture or whatever, but it sure as heck can buy me a good enough working prototype and help me secure a seed round. Reducing that cost of experimentation is the real revolution (and whether interns can learn or will pay off over time is a wholly orthogonal topic that has no bearing to this cost of experimentation revolution).

[steveBK123]

Yeah in this context I get what you are talking about. I got through your first paragraph and thought of the startup founders using overseas / gig workers a decade ago to test ideas.. which is exactly where you went!

[PeterStuer]

"hired an intern and spent money training them" and "they joined my company full time and a year later are now productive"

Why would I do that if I can have sombody else pay for the training then poach them when they are ready?

[ironman1478]

What are you doing to actually keep them at your company? I left a company after they invested a lot in training me. They gave me very little raises and already paid poorly, no guaranteed bonus, bad vacation hours, and no opportunities for promotion. They were shocked when I left, even though I had asked for very modest raises and was way more productive than the "seniors" at the company.

Most companies outside of FAANGs treat their talented juniors like crap, so of course they'll leave.

[lolinder]

Which is exactly why no one's hiring juniors anymore. It made sense back when the market for hiring engineers was super competitive and it was easier to gamble on being able to keep a junior than it was to try to snag a senior. But now that there are seniors galore on the market who would bother with a junior?

[skydhash]

> Also, there's a decently large subset of small startups where there's 1 technical founder and a team of contract labor, trying to build that first MVP or cranking out early features in a huge rush to stay alive, where yeah, cheap unlimited interns might actually be meaningfully useful or economically more attractive than whatever they're doing now

That's when experienced developers are a huge plus. They know how to cut corners in a way that will not hurt that much in the long term. It's more often intern level that are proposing stuff like next.js, kubernetes, cloud-native,... that will grind you to a halt once the first bugs appear.

A very small team of good engineers will get you much further than any army of intern level coders.

[steveBK123]

Yeah "actually good engineers" are like a 10:1 ratio with intern/new college hire/junior consultant level.

Not to generalize too much but if you are contracting out to some agency for junior levels, you are generally paying markup on coders who couldn't find better direct hire jobs to start with. At least with mid/senior level you can get into more of a hired-gun deal for someone who is between gigs/working part time/buy a share of their time you couldn't afford full-time.

In fact most junior consultants you are basically paying for the privilege to train other peoples employees who will then be billed at a higher rate back to you when they improve.. if they don't move on otherwise.