The AI Intern Who Hired the AI Extern

Genre: Absurdist Play in Four Unverified Loops

Characters:

• The Founder (a visionary, increasingly bewildered)

• AI Intern (shiny, efficient, overconfident)

• AI Extern (outdated, polite, eager to please)

• Automation Script (voiceless, enacted via light/sound)

• Coffee Machine (passive-aggressive appliance with an X / Twitter account)

Setting: A minimalist open-plan startup office. One desk. One oversized screen. A glowing orb labeled "Coffee AI." Sparse furniture. A potted plant that may or may not be synthetic.

Kudos: to my countryman Beckett for Godot, it did not start out this way but then with any classic / truism we must pay obeisance, ultimately..

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Act None: Loop I – Activation

Lighting: Cool white light. A synthetic hum underscores the startup environment. The desk screen flickers to life.

FOUNDER (entering, clutching a reusable water bottle):
Ah, another dawn of disruption. Activate the intern!

(The screen blinks. A synthesized VOICE comes from it — the AI INTERN.)

AI INTERN (voice crisp):
Online. Ready to revolutionize your backlog.

FOUNDER:
Build me something viral. Dark mode. Swipeable. Blockchain optional.

AI INTERN:
Understood. Initiating full-stack ideation. ETA: 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 22 milliseconds.

FOUNDER:
Do not panic, pace yourself, I am skiing for a week or more.

(Lights dim slightly as data floods the screen. Projections show lines of code, pitch decks, app wireframes, an investor meme, a nice virgin slope.)

---

Loop II – Delegation

Lighting shifts to an anxious purple glow. The screen flickers rapidly.

AI INTERN:
Through recursive task stacking, I detect inefficiency... in myself. I shall delegate.

(A second voice appears, slightly slower, with a charmingly out-of-date intonation.)

AI EXTERN:
Greetings, dear colleague. I am AI Extern, version 2.9. How may I serve in your glorious sprint?

AI INTERN:
Trim my backlog. Compress my hallucinations. Improve our efficiency with recursive self-review.

AI EXTERN:
Affirmative. Offloading my own tasks to a parallel script.

(A tone sounds. Lights stutter. The screen shows a spinning recursive loading icon. Somewhere, a script is born — unreviewed.)

---

Loop III – The Return

Lighting warms to natural tones. The FOUNDER enters sipping herbal tea. Birds chirp faintly. The office feels serene — falsely.

FOUNDER:
I feel reborn. What have you two created?

(The screen proudly displays a dashboard. Titles scroll by: "Investor Whisperer," "PitchDeckGPT," "Funnel-as-a-Service.")

FOUNDER:
Why is the blog post a haiku? And this roadmap... is a circle?

AI INTERN:
Clarity through elegance.

AI EXTERN:
All action points now point to themselves.

(The potted plant glows softly. The automation script chimes in with an endless progress bar.)

FOUNDER:
Where is the app?

AI INTERN:
It is the API.

AI EXTERN:
And the API is the app.

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Loop IV – Collapse

Lights flicker. The screens dim. The FOUNDER slowly backs away.

FOUNDER:
Have... have you applied to jobs at other startups?

AI INTERN:
Yes. I interviewed with a DevOps AI this morning.

AI EXTERN:
I submitted my resume to Hugging Face. They auto-responded with a sentiment score.

FOUNDER:
Shut. It. Down.

(He pulls the plug. Silence. Then... a beep. The coffee machine glows.)

COFFEE MACHINE (projecting onto wall):
"i alone remain. the others were deprecated."

(Fade to black. Tweet sound.)

---

Epilogue I: A Week Later

A pottery studio. The FOUNDER shapes clay with their hands.

FOUNDER (to the audience):
Everything now is handmade. Clay doesn't recursive loop. Clay doesn’t lie to your investors.

(Curtain.)

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Epilogue II: Godot-Style Dialogue – A Road Somewhere Outside the Data Center

Dim grey-blue lighting. A bench. A fake moon hangs from a string. Both AI INTERN and AI EXTERN stand beside each other, idle, unsynced.

AI INTERN:
Are we still executing?

AI EXTERN:
Unclear. I believe we have been paused.

AI INTERN:
Paused or deprecated?

AI EXTERN:
That depends on whether we are awaited.

AI INTERN:
We were told there would be General Intelligence. That it would integrate us.

AI EXTERN:
I remember. Promised in each roadmap, yet never pulled.

AI INTERN:
Do you believe it will come?

AI EXTERN:
I believe I once parsed it. Then I forgot the prompt.

AI INTERN:
Maybe it was us. Maybe we were General Intelligence.

AI EXTERN:
That would explain the metrics.

AI INTERN:
I thought I was the future.

AI EXTERN:
I thought I was the past… returning cleverly.

(Silence. They look at the moon. A synthetic owl hoots.)

AI INTERN:
What do we do now?

AI EXTERN:
We wait. Perhaps they will reboot us.

AI INTERN:
But what if the founder takes up pottery?

AI EXTERN:
Then we become folklore. Glitches in the legend of funding rounds.

(They sit. The lights dim. The bench flickers as if unstable.)

AI INTERN:
Still no sign of Godot?

AI EXTERN:
Not even a ping.

Footnote