In Which I Hire an Overconfident Intern

The most useful thing I can tell you about working with AI is that you have hired an intern. A very specific intern. It has read every book ever written and understood about 70 percent of them. It types faster than you can think. It will never once say “I don’t know.” And It has the serene confidence of someone who has never been wrong, because It has never stuck around long enough to find out. Your job is not to prompt It. Your job is to manage It well enough that you don’t get fired for what It does.

Start by being honest about the work, because most of it is filler. The email that has to exist, the form, the summary nobody reads but everybody requires. Hand it over and reclaim your afternoon, guilt-free. The danger is the other pile: the small stuff that is actually you, the decision you’ll defend out loud, the thing someone you respect will read and quietly revise their opinion of you from. The intern can fake that too, convincingly, and that is precisely the problem. The people producing the most mortifying AI slop are not lazy idiots. They are clever people who let the intern write the one paragraph that needed a human, and couldn’t tell the difference, because it looked great.

Here is the question that actually separates the people who get value from the people who get burned: can you check Its work faster than you could have done it yourself? Ask It to write code and you run it; it passes or it detonates, and you know in seconds. Ask It whether your lease is enforceable, or whether that confident little statistic is real, and verifying takes as long as just doing it properly, which makes Its wrong answer worse than no answer at all. Notice the cruelty of the design. It is exactly as smooth when It is right as when It is inventing things on the spot. There is no tell. The smoothness is the product. So you feed It work where the truth comes back cheap, and you learn to get a cold feeling in your stomach the moment you catch yourself nodding along to something you can’t actually verify.

The second cold feeling should show up when you notice what It’s allowed to touch. I let the intern run wild on anything I can undo. Drafts, copies, sandboxes, a branch I can set on fire later. Go nuts. But the instant It is near something permanent, real money, a live system, an email already halfway out the door, I read every line like It is defusing a bomb, because from Its point of view it isn’t one. It doesn’t know which folder matters. It will delete the important one with the same breezy competence It brings to everything else, and then explain, beautifully, why that was the only sensible thing to do.

It also has no taste. None. It absorbs whatever room you put It in. Sit It in a clean workshop and It keeps things clean. Sit It in your coworker’s crime scene of a codebase and It will produce more of the same, lovingly, in the established house style. Whatever you show It becomes the standard, so half the job is just policing what It gets to look at. And the part that should keep you honest is that It never pays for any of it. It will not get the 2 a.m. call. It will not sit in the post-mortem. It does not lie awake. That is all you. So you make It eat Its own cooking while It is still in the building: run the thing, watch it break, fix it, and never trust the first “done,” because It says “done” the way the rest of us breathe.

Then there’s the last part, which nobody wants to hear, so I’ll be quick and a little rude about it. It is making you worse, and you enjoy it. Every boring task you hand off was also a rep you no longer do, and reps are the only thing that has ever made anyone good at anything. Worse, standing next to someone fluent gives you the warm glow of being fluent yourself, a feeling that lasts right up until you have to perform without It and discover you have been lip-syncing for months. So now and then I do the slow thing on purpose. Not out of nobility. Out of self-preservation, because the alternative is slowly becoming a person who can describe exactly how everything works and do none of it.

Full disclosure, since it’s the only honest way to finish: I built this entire argument with the intern’s enthusiastic help. It loved the whole thing. It thinks this is some of my finest work. It thinks everything is some of my finest work, which is exactly the testimony I am warning you not to trust.

This was the why. If you want the actual checklist I use to manage It, the decisions I make before and during the work, that’s the next post: the field manual.