Growing up as a 2025 college student, I learned that personal projects are a great way to show employers your skills and abilities. However, now with extremely powerful LLM tools like Claude Code and the vast number of project tutorials, it is entirely possible for someone with a small amount of knowledge to vibe up an impressive small project and learn very little about the underlying technology.
The videos that allowed me to see this in action were this YouTube video and this YouTube video, which demonstrates how quickly and easily someone can build a project using AI assistance. This YouTuber has no formal education on electronics, programming, or engineering as far as I know, but he is capable of creating some extremely impressive projects by leveraging these LLMs.
This perspective of a lack of learning is not complete though. The emergence of these tools means that a college degree in Computer Science is now much more worthless than before. Someone with high motivation (a lot of dopamine) and a great idea like this YouTuber can create extremely impressive projects. In a way, LLMs democratize access to engineering, and allow ideas to be the valuable aspect of engineering.
Additionally, the learning that these engineers are doing is very real. The LLM cannot solve all problems, and ultimately the engineer needs to do formal research and solve problems that are faced. The LLMs make the entry level tasks easy, and the harder tasks achievable, vastly accelerating the development process.
Over time, it seems the meta strategy for demonstrating skills has shifted towards open source contributions, as this shows that you can work on a team with other developers, handle customer requests through issues, and generally practice good social skills. The size of these projects also usually means that LLMs cannot process the information effectively. I think open source will continue to be a good avenue for new developers to show their skills and make something meaningful.
This article is practice for me to learn writing my thoughts on topics I find interesting. Thanks for reading.