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Do internships still make sense in the AI era? Does your company still offer them?

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Recently, I came across where someone asked whether to skip the internship and build the product with AI instead.

I see the same trend on X. Some founders are just 14, 15, or 16 years old already building tools, and some are even raising funding. AI has completely changed what's possible.

Today, we welcomed a new summer intern at Minimalist Phone. I still think internships have value. You meet people, learn how a company works, and gain experience you can't get on your own. [it gives you a clear structure about processes and how to work with collegues]

But it made me wonder...

Will internships become less common?

And if they survive, should companies redesign them so interns have a real path to a full-time role?

With AI reducing the need for many junior positions, I wonder if building your own project will become the better career path for many. What's your take?

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100%. Interns give us the most fuel at . Actually, 50% of our was built by a summer intern, and he used Claude incredibly effectively.

AI has definitely changed the equation.

A motivated teenager today can build in a few months what once required an entire team. That's incredible. But building a product and building a career aren't always the same thing.

Internships still teach things AI can't easily replicate: how teams collaborate, how decisions get made, how to communicate, prioritize, and deliver in a real business environment. Those lessons are hard to learn in isolation.

That said, I think internships will have to evolve. Companies can't expect interns to spend months on repetitive tasks that AI can already do. The best programs will focus on ownership, critical thinking, and working alongside AI, with a clear path to a full time role.

One question I keep coming back to is this:

Will the strongest candidates of the next decade be those with the best internship experience, or those who have already built and shipped real products with AI? 🤔

Congrats on the new intern.

The part I would push back on is the idea that AI reduces the need for juniors because juniors produced output. Mostly they did not. A junior's first year is usually net negative on output, since the time spent reviewing and correcting exceeds what you save. Nobody hires a junior for year one. You are buying the person they become in year three.

So AI taking the boilerplate does not really touch the reason juniors were worth it. What it does touch, and this is the part that worries me, is how they get to year three. If someone produces work they cannot evaluate, they never build the judgement, and then they never become the senior who could have reviewed it. The pipeline does not break because there is no work. It breaks because the work stopped teaching.

On building your own project instead, that teaches you to build, which is the easy half. It does not teach you to inherit someone else's mess, disagree with a colleague and still ship, or maintain something for two years after the interesting part is over. Those are what make someone worth hiring, and a solo project never puts you near them.

If you are redesigning the internship, that is where I would point it. If AI does the producing, make the internship about judging. Hand them AI output and have them find what is wrong with it, then explain why. That skill is getting scarce quickly, and it is one you cannot pick up on your own, which is exactly the argument you made for internships in the first place.

I still think they're incredibly valuable. In fact, we're currently looking for backend interns at the company I work for.

AI can help you write code, but it doesn't teach you how to work with a team, review code, communicate trade-offs, or build software that other people depend on. Not everyone needs to become a founder. Great engineers are built by working with other great engineers, and internships are still one of the best places for that.

We still do offer it and my take is the real value is not the project itself but how to work well with others , how to listen and execute what team demands :)

I personally really like working with interns. They have a fresh take on everything and sometimes ask difficult questions. There fresh perspective helped us alot.
With experience we got bound to work in a particular way.
Also congratulation for new hires :)

I read your question less as “Are internships still useful?” and more as “Do people still want to enter existing structures at all?” AI gives full product autonomy. You can build, ship, and iterate alone. Internships only matter if someone wants exposure to real organizational systems — not if they prefer the AI‑driven solo‑builder path.

internships as we knew them were always a proxy for "this person can handle a real job." when you can build a real product in your bedroom at 16, the proxy loses its function.

but the underlying signal, someone with authority saw them do the work and vouched, is what actually got translated to a hire. the intern's manager wrote the reference. that's the primitive.

replacement isn't "skip internships." it's "find someone with credibility who watched you ship and can vouch when the reference call happens." the form changes. the vouch is still the entire game.

Both can be true. I have shipped a stack of products solo with AI tooling alongside a full time analytics job, so the build your own path clearly works. But the thing an internship gives you that a solo project cannot is watching a real team decide under constraints: handovers, politics, why a good idea dies in review. AI compresses how to build, not how organisations actually work. If internships survive they should lean into that, a real slice of ownership and exposure to how the business runs, not fetch work.