> will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more
Well, maybe it'll be the other way around: Maybe they'll need more hand-holding since they're used to relying on AI instead of doing things themselves, and when faced with tasks they need to do, they will be less able.
But, eh, what am I even talking about? The _senior_ developers in a many companies need a lot of hand-holding that they aren't getting, write bad code, with poor practices, and teach the newbies how to get used to doing that. So that's why the entry-level people are screwed, AI or no.
You’ve eloquently expressed exactly the same disconnect: as long as we think the purpose of internships is to write the same kind of code that interns write today, sure, AI probably makes the whole thing less efficient.
But if the purpose of an internship is to learn how to work in a company, while producing some benefit for the company, I think everything gets better. Just like we don’t measure today’s terms by words per minute typed, I don’t think we’ll measure tomorrow’s interns by Lines of code that hand – written.
So much of the doom here comes from a thought process that goes “we want the same outcomes as today, but the environment is changing, therefore our precious outcomes are at risk.“
Well, maybe it'll be the other way around: Maybe they'll need more hand-holding since they're used to relying on AI instead of doing things themselves, and when faced with tasks they need to do, they will be less able.
But, eh, what am I even talking about? The _senior_ developers in a many companies need a lot of hand-holding that they aren't getting, write bad code, with poor practices, and teach the newbies how to get used to doing that. So that's why the entry-level people are screwed, AI or no.