📣 Summer camps are now open: Early bird pricing active until April 15. Build a real AI app in a week; Go from AI-curious to AI-ready this summer!
🌟 Founder musings
Autonomous is easy. Engaged is the skill.
This week Claude’s core architecture code was leaked due to a human error. A student from University of British Columbia worked with another student from Seoul and a team of 10 OpenClaw agents to rewrite Claude using Python in 2 hours. The entire logic that Anthropic built over months rewritten in 2 hours! This event highlights how high the stakes are with AI in the mix.
Ayesha coined a term this week and as we were talking about it, I realized it was such an apt word for what we're actually teaching! With the onset of AI assisted coding such as Claude and Cursor, it is now easy to tell AI what you want and just blindly use it. But this process neither yields great code nor a good understanding. Autonomous engineering is not what companies are looking for. They are looking for “engaged engineering”. Are you able to stay engaged with the AI as it helps you build? Do you understand or are you able to engage with AI on what it has buillt ? This is what we teach students at Flintolabs even before they set foot in college.
One of the articles this week highlights the experience of a non-coder that used vibe coding to build an app that looked finished but wasn't. The takeaways from the article are similar - AI can help expedite what you build but knowing what is happening and understanding what is being built is non-negotiable.
And building this muscle when you are in high school is exactly the kind of advantage you want to develop.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Submission deadline: May 27, 2026 · Registration: Open now · Free to enter
What: Coolest Projects is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's global technology showcase for young people up to age 18. Students submit a digital project they've built, anything from a Scratch game to a working hardware device to an AI application, and their work is showcased in an international online gallery. This year's showcase includes a dedicated AI category.
Who: Any young person up to age 18, anywhere in the world. Students can enter individually or in teams of up to five. Those 13+ can register themselves.
Format: Students submit their project online with a short video walkthrough. Judges review every entry and provide personalized feedback. VIP judges highlight standout projects in a worldwide celebration livestream on June 24, 2026. There are also in-person events across the US, in Minnesota on April 11 and Atlanta on May 2, for students who want to showcase live.
Why it's great: Unlike high-pressure elimination competitions, Coolest Projects is structured as a supportive showcase, so students get real feedback on their work, build confidence presenting it, and connect with a global community of young builders. Every participant receives certificates and a judge's review, making it genuinely useful for portfolios and college applications regardless of ranking.
Perfect for: Students who have already built an app, website, game, or AI project and want a legitimate venue to show it off, or students who want a motivating deadline to finally finish something they've been working on.
🚀 Stay Inspired
💻 Vibe coding has a dirty secret - productivity tax!
A content writer at Stack Overflow decided to build an app using only vibe coding, no code knowledge, just natural language prompts in Bolt. Ten minutes in, she had something that looked like an app. It had a UI, review pages, rating options. The only problem: it didn't work at all.
What followed was 45 minutes of pasting error messages into the AI dialogue box, following instructions she didn't understand, and eventually shipping something that functioned on the surface but was, according to her developer friends, a security risk with messy, nearly unreadable code. One friend noted there were no unit tests. Another pointed out the app was wide open to hacking. A developer would have had to clean up everything before it could go anywhere real.
The article quotes Stack Overflow's own Developer Survey: 66% of developers experience the "productivity tax" of AI coding tools, code that is almost but not quite right, requiring cleanup before it's usable. The writer's conclusion is sharp: vibe coding is powerful in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. In the hands of someone who doesn't, it produces something that looks finished but isn't.
The contrast she offers at the end is the real story. A friend with a Stanford physics PhD used the same tools to actually learn to code, using AI to understand bugs rather than just paste around them. Same tools, completely different outcomes. One built understanding. One built a toilet app that didn't work.
🎓 The skills gap starts before graduation
Something significant is shifting inside higher education, and it's showing up in the enrollment data.
According to Cengage's 2025 Graduate Employability Report, only 51% of graduates believe they had sufficient AI skills for the jobs they applied to. At the same time, only 30% of 2025 graduates secured full-time work in their field, and nearly half felt unprepared to apply for entry-level roles. Colleges are responding: some majors are actively retooling around AI-driven careers, and demand for career-focused degrees, short credentials, and trade programs is rising while traditional four-year computer science enrollment shows early signs of decline.
The gap between what colleges teach and what employers need is not new. What's new is how fast it's widening. Colleges that are adapting are investing in employer partnerships, AI-integrated curriculum, and programs that connect learning directly to outcomes after graduation.
For high schoolers watching this shift, the window to get ahead of it is right now, before college, not during it. The students who arrive at college already knowing how to build, not just use, AI applications start from a position that most of their peers won't reach for years.
💻 Student spotlight
When a game is the lesson: Viven's summer internship project
Most games are built to entertain. Viven Manivannan built one to make you think twice.
During his summer internship at Flintolabs last year, Viven spent the bulk of his time designing a mystery game with a message baked in. The premise: a monster is chasing the player, and notifications keep arriving about where it might be. The catch is that some of those notifications are fake, modeled directly on the kind of misinformation people encounter scrolling through social media every day. To survive, the player has to learn to question what they're told.
What Viven built wasn't just a working game. It was an argument, made in code, that the best way to teach someone about misinformation isn't to lecture them about it. It's to make them feel the consequence of believing the wrong thing.
The internship went further than one project. Viven also taught another intern the basics of Unity, discovering something most builders figure out eventually: you understand something better the moment you have to explain it. He also joined sessions exploring how AI fits into creative and technical work, adding new ideas to what he was already building.
That's what a Flintolabs internship looks like. Not busywork. Not shadowing. Students take on a real project with a real brief, figure out what they don't know, and build through it. Viven arrived curious and left with a shipped game, a teaching moment, and a clearer picture of what he wants to build next.
🔥 Real AI skills. Real internships. Before college.
🎁 May cohort enrollment now open
The April cohort is underway and students are already building. If your student has been on the fence, the May cohort is your next window.
Here's what you get with just one hour per week for 6 months:
✅ Hands-on AI skills through building real applications, not watching lectures
✅ 3 transferable college credits from University of Colorado Denver
✅ Portfolio of real work that demonstrates capability to colleges and employers
✅ Small class sizes (capped at 20 students) ensuring personalized attention
✅ Advanced concepts like OpenCV, Minimax algorithms, computer vision, and more
✅ The critical thinking and problem-solving skills employers desperately need
Most college graduates are entering a job market where 59% of employers still report an AI skills gap despite years of training programs. Flintolabs students don't wait for college to fix that. They build real portfolios before they get there.
Classes start Saturday, May 2!
Our program has a 5-star rating with reviews from both students and parents. Questions? Email us at [email protected]
🌞 Summer is coming and so is your first AI internship.
Flintolabs is launching two summer programs for students starting 7th grade:
AI Launchpad — 1 week, virtual, $399 early bird (ends April 15). Daily live Zoom sessions and hands-on labs. Students go from zero to shipping their own AI-powered app by Friday, covering APIs, OpenAI, Cursor, v0, Vercel, and GitHub.
AI Internship Track — 5 weeks, virtual, $949 early bird (ends April 15). Everything in AI Launchpad, plus a real 4-week internship project matched to the student's interests, a portfolio page, demo day with tech leaders, and real resume experience.
Spots are capped at 15 students per cohort. Weekly cohorts run from May 24 through August.
Found this valuable? Forward this newsletter to other high schoolers and parents who want to be informed about AI trends and what is needed to prepare for an AI-driven future. Every student deserves the chance to build real skills before college.
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