Internships, AI tools, and useful friction

Internships are good at showing the gap between the demo and the day.

You ship tickets, learn the house style, and occasionally argue with an internal AI tool that answers confidently and incorrectly. That friction is useful. It makes you care about naming, validation, and the boring middle of a product - the parts that keep people from getting lost.

I'm still deciding what kind of engineer I want to be. The working answer: someone who prefers clear structure over clever shortcuts, even when the clever thing is trending.