I think the hard thing with this though is that you can ask them to do things you'd never expect of an intern, and they can sometimes be super helpful. For example, I have a synchronous audit log in an app on a table that is just getting way too big and it's causing performance issues on writes. For kicks I tried working through Claude Code to see if it could find the issue on it's own, then with some hinting, and what solutions it would come up with. Some of it's solutions were indeed intern-level suggestions (like make the call async and do a sleep in tons of other areas to avoid race conditions, despite me telling it that the request needed to fail if it couldn't be logged properly), but in other ways it came up with possible solutions that were interesting and I hadn't considered before. In other words, it acted like a Sr engineer at some points with thought partnering, while in other places it acted like an over-eager but underqualified intern.
Exactly. And no one with any sense gives an intern write permission for the production database. I don’t trust myself on the production database when I’m coding anything that involves migrations.
And I don’t suppose there were backups for the mission-critical production database?
I think the hard thing with this though is that you can ask them to do things you'd never expect of an intern, and they can sometimes be super helpful. For example, I have a synchronous audit log in an app on a table that is just getting way too big and it's causing performance issues on writes. For kicks I tried working through Claude Code to see if it could find the issue on it's own, then with some hinting, and what solutions it would come up with. Some of it's solutions were indeed intern-level suggestions (like make the call async and do a sleep in tons of other areas to avoid race conditions, despite me telling it that the request needed to fail if it couldn't be logged properly), but in other ways it came up with possible solutions that were interesting and I hadn't considered before. In other words, it acted like a Sr engineer at some points with thought partnering, while in other places it acted like an over-eager but underqualified intern.
Exactly. And no one with any sense gives an intern write permission for the production database. I don’t trust myself on the production database when I’m coding anything that involves migrations.
And I don’t suppose there were backups for the mission-critical production database?
An intern can suffer negative consequences for fucking your DB. An LLM suffers nothing and is beyond the law.
In this case it’s more Homer Simpson than intern.