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Lenny's 🏦 Vault

AI-Enabled Intern Ships First PR on Day One

by Garrett Lord on August 24, 2025

Situation

In the context of rapidly evolving AI tools in the workplace, Handshake was experiencing firsthand how AI-native workers were changing productivity expectations. The company was observing a shift in how quickly new team members could become productive, particularly comparing traditional onboarding timelines with those of AI-enabled employees.

Actions

  • A new intern joined Handshake's engineering team
  • The intern immediately leveraged AI tools to help navigate the codebase and understand the bug
  • Instead of spending days or weeks getting familiar with the development environment and understanding where to make changes, the intern was able to identify, fix, and submit a pull request (PR) for a bug on their very first afternoon

Results

  • The intern shipped a working PR on day one, dramatically accelerating the typical onboarding timeline
  • This demonstrated a concrete example of how AI tools can compress weeks of learning and orientation into hours
  • The experience validated Handshake CEO Garrett Lord's belief that AI-native young professionals have significant advantages in the workplace
  • It showed how AI tools function as an "Ironman suit" that amplifies capabilities, particularly for those comfortable using them

Key Lessons

  • AI dramatically compresses onboarding time: Tasks that previously took days or weeks of environment setup and codebase familiarization can now be accomplished in hours with AI assistance.

  • AI-native workers have inherent advantages: Just as previous generations listed "Google search" as a skill, being comfortable with AI tools provides a significant productivity advantage in today's workplace.

  • Entry-level positions are evolving, not disappearing: Rather than eliminating jobs for young professionals, AI is transforming these roles to enable greater impact earlier in one's career.

  • Technical barriers to contribution are lowering: Development environment setup, codebase understanding, and other traditional barriers to first contributions are being flattened by AI tools.

  • Productivity expectations are shifting: Companies need to recalibrate expectations around how quickly new team members can contribute meaningful work when equipped with AI tools.

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