some interns are missing, it is what it is
sometimes i'll come up with random sentences and this is just a place to dump them
don't expect anything too deep, or even anything related to a central thesis
ig this is just me trying to practice writing?
idk i'm a cs major what do you want from me
Friday was the last day of my internship at Windsurf.
Given that I started it mid-June (since UCLA has the godforsaken quarter system), you might think that this internship was a bit short. Most last around 10 or 12 weeks, so at least two months.
To explain why, though, I probably should give some context for the non-techbros. Around mid-July, our CEO Varun abandoned us for Google DeepMind, taking along with him his co-founder and a bunch of other people. This group even included a fellow MSJ-er that I went to UCLA with.
After that announcement (which was also on a Friday, funnily enough), I thought I would get fired. I mean, who cares? There was literally nothing I could've done. Of course, to make things even funnier, on Monday the interrim CEO Jeff Wang announced that Windsurf was getting acquired by Cognition.
Most of you probably don't know what the hell Cognition is. To keep things short, it's a tiny company run by a bunch of snarky MIT IOI medalists who made Devin, which — as you might've guessed — is just a glorified GPT wrapper.
But no matter who bought us, this meant I was employed for the time being. Besides a couple new people making commits to the codebase, my internship went basically the same. Walk in, write some code, tear my hair out over a bug, flip a table over a stupid dependency error, walk out.
But then, just this Monday, the CEO of the company that bought us made an announcement that was reported on here. This actually didn't apply to that many of the interns here, since they went to semester schools and their internships were going to end in like a week anyways. But for me and another UCLA intern, this meant working demon hours for an entire month.
Yeah, uh, hell no.
He and I asked the higher-ups if we could cut out internships early. Given that they were giving existing employees a whole 9 months of severance, I thought it would be reasonable for them to pay us out for the rest of our internship term as well. Thankfully, they said yes, and now here I am typing after the last week of my internship.
The last day of work is a lot like the last day of school. Besides getting my final PRs merged, there wasn't really any code I could write.
I stared at the endless list of Linear tickets, trying to find a single one that was small enough and pertained to the part of the app I worked on. It was like opening the fridge for the millionth time in a day and still finding nothing to eat. I'd checked this list a bajillion times already, and yet I hoped this scrollthrough would lead me to miraculously find something good.
Of course, there wasn't. All the bugs and requests that pertained to my part of the code were either too obscure or already being worked on by someone else. Half of them were already tagged "could not reproduce", and yet they were still in the "Todo" section. Not wanting to get ahead of myself, I refrained from moving any of them to "Done".
Clicking off of Linear, I switched to my Slack tab: nothing there. I then checked all three of my email accounts: nothing there either.
Sigh.
I got up to refill my tea before sitting back down to read some NYT opinion slop. If there was nothing I could do, reading was always my fallback at this office. It's interesting enough to keep my brain from melting out my ears while not arousing any suspicion about productivity amongst my coworkers.
The clock struck lunchtime before I knew it. That I'd arrived an hour later due to a TikTok OA probably had something to do with it, but who cares? As usual, I went out with my team and this one guy from Cognition. They said they were headed to an Indian buffet, which, well, not my first choice, but who am I to decide?
I had to take a call for some interview stuff with Citadel, though, so I was delayed 15 minutes. When I sat down at the table with a couple pieces of chicken and a large scoop of rice, I realized that everyone else had basically finished and was listening to the Cognition guy soapbox.
I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was something about how Cognition was going to change the world, yada yada, basic techbro stuff. What I found surprising was that one of the interns actually asked him some questions that were very AI-skeptical. One question I remember him asking is something along the lines of,
"Currently Devin [the product Cognition makes] can do some small fixes here and there, but I currently haven't seen it do anything substantial. Given that, do you still think Cognition will ultimately be a successful company?"
The Cognition guy actually had a pretty level-headed response. According to him, even with the level of intelligence LLMs currently have, they already have people getting actual value out of it, including himself. An example he gave was fixing a stupid bug I accidentally introduced that was adding a "j" in front of every paragraph in a component. Yes, this is as silly as it sounds.
Me personally, I don't really think the time it saves you by looking through the codebase for you is worth the knowledge lost from not looking through it yourself, but I digress. If there are people out there who actually get value from Devin, who am I to judge?
He wounded up yapping for at least half an hour before we finally got up. It's honestly impressive to me how some people can go on about this stuff for so long.
At this point I wanted to leave, but someone told me they were gonna hand out hoodies. If there's one thing you can hook me with, it's free merch. I DM'd the guy in charge my size (an M) and was told it would take until the end of the godforsaken workday for them to get handed out.
It was at this point that I realized basically no one was working. All the interns were just sitting around in the middle of the office, chatting and laughing it up. Around 2, the marketing people decided it would be nice for the interns to get a group photo together. All those who hadn't just up and left already gathered in the shooting area where they also happened to shoot all the release promotions, and thus began the agonizing process of figuring out who to place where.
Each time the camerman got us in a slightly decent position, some interns who had just heard about the picture rushed in and we had to awkwardly shuffle around until they were accommodated. We ended up at two long rows of people with the front row doing a sorority squat:
After this, I gave up trying to even look like I was doing work. I got my laptop, went upstairs to find an unoccupied meeting room, and just started doomscrolling while listening to the orchestral OMORI cover (peak music btw, i recommend it even to those who haven't played the game).
Finally, a couple minutes before the clock struck 4, I went down vainly hoping that the hoodies were delivered. To my surprise, I saw that wonderful cream-colored hoodie (no, not a Great Gatsby reference for anyone who cares) laying on top of my chair. Trying it on, it seemed a little baggy, but the others said it looked fine and so I didn't think much of it.
With my hoodie acquired, I could finally get the hell out of there. The thing is, I don't bring my backpack to work (my computer is always at the office anyways), so I needed to find something to put my teacup and other stuff in for the VTA ride home. In my rush to get home, I settled for using a plastic ziploc that originally had a goddamn HDMI cable in it. It was a tight fit, but I managed to put my things in there with a bit of squeezing.
"Alright guys, I'm leaving- y'all have fun!" While my departure at my internship last year was filled with handshakes and fistbumps, this time it was nothing more than a simple farewell.
As I leave, one of the interns who actually took up the 80-hour offer yelled out, "Goated intern!" Failing the quick-time event, the best I could come up with was an "Alright!" before I left the door, mortified that I'd somehow managed fumble the last social interaction of my internship.
When I got home, I threw the hoodie I got into the washing machine, as is my family's procedure with freshly procured clothing. As it flew in, I caught a glimpse of the tag: an L.
Absolutely incredible.
I'd be lying if I said I disliked my internship. It was an amazing experience and my first time working with a codebase where 99% of the code wasn't written by me. It's very sad that Scott Wu had to cut it short by such a weird method, though.
But at the very least, this is a story that I can tell when getting acquainted with others at my next workplace. Certainly a summer to remember.