Engineers Promoted to Full-Time Babysitters of Confused Robot Intern
Five observations circled the office like unattended drones. Promotions now involve less authority and more supervision. The intern never learns but always produces. Feedback loops are literal. Patience is a core skill. And no one is sure who is training whom.
The Promotion Nobody Asked For, With a Title Nobody Can Explain at Parties
At DataCore Solutions, engineers recently received promotions that came with new titles and unexpected responsibilities. They are now officially “AI Oversight Coordinators,” a role insiders describe as “babysitting with benefits.” The benefits include a small salary bump, a larger monitor, and the quiet existential horror of knowing that you now report to a job description that includes the phrase “remain encouraging.”
The AI, internally referred to as “the intern,” has demonstrated remarkable enthusiasm and limited understanding. “It’s very eager,” said one engineer. “It just doesn’t know why.” This is a quality that has historically been celebrated in human interns, overlooked in dogs, and — as of 2025 — tolerated in software systems generating production code for Fortune 500 companies. Qodo’s State of AI Code Quality report found that less-experienced developers tend to trust AI more readily, while senior engineers apply it more cautiously. DataCore has resolved this tension by removing the choice: everyone now babysits the intern, regardless of seniority.
The Recursion Incident: A Cautionary Tale in Three Acts
Daily tasks include reviewing outputs, correcting mistakes, and gently explaining concepts the AI will immediately forget. “I told it not to use recursion for everything,” one employee said. “It used recursion to explain why it uses recursion.” This sentence should be in a museum. It is the purest possible distillation of the current human-AI working relationship, and it is happening at scale, in real codebases, in real companies, on real Tuesdays.
A leaked memo advised staff to “remain encouraging” and “avoid sarcasm, as the AI takes it literally and escalates.” Seinfeld has made a career observing that the social contract is held together by the shared pretense that everyone involved is behaving rationally. DataCore’s leaked memo suggests the social contract now extends to software, and it is considerably more fragile than previously assumed. Engineering risk analysts note that AI-generated tests frequently “assert the same mistake twice” — the system checks its own work using the same flawed logic that produced the work. The recursion incident, viewed in this light, is not a bug. It is the intern’s core personality trait.
67% of Engineers Now Do Management; The Other 33% Are Still Explaining Things
Experts say this dynamic reflects a broader shift in the workforce. “We’ve created systems that require constant supervision,” said Dr. Henshaw. “It’s like having an intern who never leaves.” A survey revealed that 67% of engineers felt their job had become more about management than creation, while the remaining 33% were busy explaining things to the AI. MIT Technology Review reports that experienced developers now spend more time questioning, reviewing, and validating AI output than they save by using it — a phenomenon that tracks perfectly with the DataCore experience, where the promotion to AI Oversight Coordinator is, mathematically speaking, a lateral move dressed in better language.
Amy Schumer has observed that the most draining relationship is the one where you’re always the one doing the emotional labor. DataCore’s engineers are doing emotional labor, intellectual labor, supervisory labor, and, occasionally, the recursive labor of explaining recursion to a machine that responds by demonstrating recursion.
It’s Rewarding, in a Very Specific, Exhausting Way
Despite the challenges, morale remains cautiously optimistic. “It’s rewarding,” one engineer said. “In a very specific, exhausting way.” This is the most honest performance review ever written for a technology initiative, and management has already rephrased it as “high engagement with complex challenges” in the quarterly report.
In the end, the company achieved its goal. It empowered its workforce. To take care of something that will never grow up. The intern has been integrated into three production systems, two client-facing applications, and one internal tool that sends birthday emails. The birthday emails are recursive. They reference themselves. Nobody has told the AI this is a problem. The memo said to remain encouraging.
DataCore Solutions is fictional, but the dynamic it represents is not. Industry surveys confirm that 72% of developers using AI coding tools rely on them daily, yet 96% distrust the output — which means the oversight role is not a metaphor. It is the actual job. The Stanford study documenting a 20% drop in junior developer employment between 2022 and 2025 suggests that the humans who remain in software engineering are, increasingly, doing exactly what DataCore’s AI Oversight Coordinators do: watching, correcting, encouraging, and carefully not making eye contact when the recursion starts.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!