AI execs keep giving advice that young programmers should focus on AI instead of doing internships, etc. this is abominable advice, for many reasons. I’m going to focus on two:
1.) Jobs teach you more than your discipline. At a job — even a remote one — you learn the insider particulars of your industry and a lot more about real development practices. Most students don’t get much experience working on teams, on larger projects, and that experience is beneficial.
Feb 5, 2026 01:152.) Even if you have to use LLM agents to generate code, your value-add to that relationship isn’t prompting skill: It’s programming skill. The people squeezing the most value out of these systems are seasoned programmers. Leaning on an LLM may well diminish that hard skill acquisition.
AI execs keep giving advice that young programmers should focus on AI instead of doing internships, etc. this is abominable advice, for many reasons. I’m going to focus on two: