[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.

[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?

[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.