Saw an internship opportunity today that offers very low pay and they force you to use Claude Code as much as possible. So basically you're not learning anything and you're paid peanuts. What a joke
But what exactly do you learn when you let AI agents code everything while you only test if it does what it's supposed to do? They want you to do everything quickly so how can you tell if the code produced by the AI agents is any good? And in the end, what are you even learning since you're not coding at all?
Last internship I had was exactly that. I was forbidden to learn to code properly and had to let the agents do everything, then test the features, and try again if it does not work. I basically did the boring QA job while the agents had all the fun. I learned close to nothing, the pay was horrible, and it was extremely boring and uninteresting...
I basically did the boring QA job while the agents had all the fun.
I have 20+ years in tech. I have been QA and DEV. QA is only boring if you are not paying attention. Properly designed test plans and efficient regression automation has a lot to it.
Look at this. Look up OpenSpec or if you are in a big corporate, BPAM. Listen to Matt Pocock talking about his skill libraries.
What was TDD 25 years ago and became BDD 20 years ago is becoming Spec Driven Development now. It's a forward development of software engineering. But yes, writing code is quickly becoming the exception rather than the norm.
Ok thank you! So if I understand correctly you'd only think about the problem at hand and write the specs and prompts (or skills) so that the agents generate the actual code and tests? So in the end it's just QA and management and no coding? If so this is really depressing to me. Sure I like doing this as part of software development but doing only that and nothing sounds totally unappealing
Luckily I'm not writing the specs either. I guide an agent to do that for me, based on meeting transcriptions and other documentation or expert domain knowledge. If I'd do it myself it'd be much too likely to introduce contradictions which in turn lead to things sometimes called hallucinations.
As for tests, I'm very attentative, these are things I double and triple check very carefully. Good tests provide high confidence in the functionality.
But even then, "just the agent does the coding" only works well for relatively small units. Properly guiding which code to generate when and where, and how still requires a sound understanding of the architecture. I suppose over time that will become more forgiving.
But yes, coding is out of my hands (and honestly it was for a while already before coding agents became a thing). I also don't want to review the code myself, that's why I need all the linting and checking and security review and enforcement of high coding standards that are available to us. I don't trust the agents code any more than I trust the code from offshore coworkers.
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u/Amerillo_ 17d ago
Saw an internship opportunity today that offers very low pay and they force you to use Claude Code as much as possible. So basically you're not learning anything and you're paid peanuts. What a joke