Thrown Into the Deep End (And Why We Didn’t Drown): Our Internship at CodifyIQ

2026 interns Kyle and Brendan share their perspective on 8 days of software delivery.

We’re two high school seniors who spent the last 8 days interning at CodifyIQ through our school’s Senior Internship Program. Neither of us really knew what to expect going in. What we got was something we couldn’t have learned in a classroom.

Day One

The first morning kicked off with a meeting where our mentor walked us through a lot of information at once. We understood maybe half of it in real time. He acknowledged that and was upfront about his teaching philosophy: the best way to learn is to just do things. There was no hand-holding planned. We’d figure it out by doing it.

That approach felt intimidating at first, but looking back, it’s why the 8 days felt so dense. When you’re responsible for solving your own problems, you actually remember the solutions.

Learning to Work with AI

One of the first things we were introduced to was AI-assisted development. In practice, this means using an AI tool to help write code rather than typing everything out line by line. It sounds like a shortcut, but the reality is more interesting than that.

The AI can produce code quickly, but it doesn’t always get things right. You have to be able to read what it gives you, understand what it’s actually doing, and catch the places where it’s wrong or where it doesn’t fit what you’re building. That means a strong grasp of the fundamentals matters more with AI, not less. The bottleneck shifts from writing code to understanding it.

The Work (And What We Actually Learned From It)

We each worked on separate projects but stayed closely connected throughout, reviewing each other’s code and helping troubleshoot problems. That back-and-forth turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of the experience.

Both of us ran into the same situation at some point: we’d put real work into something, and then the direction shifted. An integration needed to be rethought, or the approach changed. That’s not a failure; it’s just how software development works. Requirements evolve. The skill is learning to adapt and keep moving, and we both had to practice that firsthand.

By the end of our time here, we’d each gone through multiple projects, picked up speed with every one, and come out with a much clearer picture of what working in software actually looks like day to day. Not just writing code, but communicating about it, getting it reviewed, making changes based on feedback, and shipping it.

So why didn’t we drown?

Probably because we had each other for constant code reviews and troubleshooting, a mentor who actually explained the reasoning behind what we were building, and enough stubbornness to figure things out when we got stuck. Being thrown in the deep end forced us to develop the exact skills that actually matter: reading and debugging AI-generated code, adapting when requirements shifted, asking smart questions instead of waiting to be told what to do, and learning from each other through constant back-and-forth. Understanding half of day one turned into understanding most of day two, and by the end of the week we were moving faster than we thought possible. Eight days felt short going in. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how much fit inside them.

What We’re Taking Away

Eight days isn’t a long time, but the way this internship was structured made it count. Being thrown into a real workflow, with real tools, working on a real codebase, and having a mentor who explained the reasoning behind everything we were building, not just the tasks themselves, made the experience stick in a way that’s hard to replicate otherwise.

If you get the chance to do something like this: take it. Even if you only understand half of what’s thrown at you on day one.