Thursday Thoughts: Every Intern Is a Builder Now
Something happened in our finance department recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. We're bringing on a summer intern, a college student, not a CS major, and her project isn't to shadow someone or build a deck or update a spreadsheet. Her project is to observe our actual business processes: MBO gathering, payout cycles, closing the books. Then she's going to vibe code an application or agentic workflow that automates parts of what she observed, and present the whole thing back to her class as her intern project.
I know that might sound like a small thing. It isn't.
"Developer" Doesn't Mean What It Used to Mean
I've been saying for a while now that developer no longer equals software engineer. That equation made sense for a long time. If you wanted to build something real, you needed to write real code, which meant you needed years of training. But that's not the world we're in anymore.
Today, a developer is anyone with an idea who wants to build something. It might be lightweight. It might be scrappy. It might be an internal tool that automates a process nobody bothered to automate because it wasn't worth a full engineering sprint. That era, the era of vibe coding, is here, and it's moving faster than most companies realize.
I've felt this personally through the journey of writing this blog. I've gone from someone with a passing curiosity about software to someone who can build fully production apps, spin up home labs, and experiment with frontier AI projects without flinching. Not because I suddenly became a software engineer, but because AI gave me a co-pilot capable enough to close the gap between idea and execution. That experience made me a believer. What I saw with this intern made me something more than that.
What an Internship Used to Look Like
There's always been a rough hierarchy of internship value. Engineering internships were prized because you could actually ship something. You could point to a PR, a feature, a deployed tool. That's a concrete artifact. Everything else, finance, ops, marketing, HR, you were lucky to get a bullet point on your resume that wasn't embarrassingly vague.
That asymmetry always bothered me, but it felt structural. If you can't write code, you can't build things, and if you can't build things, there's a ceiling on what you can show for your time.
Vibe coding breaks that ceiling. The ability to build real, deployed tools is no longer gated by a CS degree. What it requires now is the ability to observe a process, understand what problem needs solving, and work iteratively with AI to construct something that addresses it. Those are skills a sharp finance intern absolutely has. And now they can prove it.
The Resume Has Changed Forever
Here's what strikes me about this situation: a summer intern is going to walk out with a concrete, deployed project in her portfolio. Not a simulation. Not a case study. An actual automation she built to solve an actual problem at an actual company.
That used to be the exclusive territory of software engineering internships. Now it's available to anyone whose employer gives them the tools and the latitude to build.
Think about what that does over time:
- Finance students who can automate their own workflows become dramatically more valuable than those who can't
- Operations interns who ship internal tools leave with proof of judgment, not just exposure
- Any non-technical role that involves repetitive process work becomes a candidate for this kind of intern project
- The line between "business intern" and "builder" starts to blur in exactly the right way
I worry about the current graduating classes. The labor market is disorienting right now, and a lot of students are trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves in a world where AI is compressing certain kinds of entry-level work. But I also think there's a real opening here for the ones who figure out vibe coding early. The question isn't whether you have a CS degree. The question is whether you can ship something.
What Companies Need to Do
What I'd love to see, and what I think the smarter companies will figure out soon, is making vibe coding a golden path for all employees, not just engineers. That means giving people access to the right tools in a governed, enterprise-appropriate way. It means designing internship programs around it. It means treating "I built this" as a meaningful credential regardless of job function.
The companies that lean into this are going to get a productivity multiplier that's hard to explain until you've seen it. The ones that don't are going to watch their more forward-thinking competitors pull ahead in ways that look mysterious from the outside but are actually pretty simple: they let their people build things.
We're in a genuine golden era of innovation right now, and I don't say that lightly. I've seen enough hype cycles to be skeptical of my own enthusiasm. But watching an intern prepare to spend a summer observing business processes and then automating them, and knowing she'll leave with a real project to show for it, that feels like something different. That feels like a shift.
If your company brought vibe coding to every internship program starting tomorrow, what would get built?