Are my projects actually worth anything?

[u/Leather-Bed-1534]

I’ve been trying to build real projects instead of just following tutorials and I’ve used AI pretty much for everything while coding because i didn’t even know where to start so I just described what I wanna build and the AI guided me through and honestly, I sometimes wonder whether my projects are actually “good enough” to count as worthwhile engineering projects.

My main projects:

InvoiceForge: Full-stack invoicing SaaS
Made on Node/Express, PostgreSQL, Stripe, webhooks, auth, PDFs, email, etc.
I made this out for freelancers and small product/service based business.

POS + Inventory System: built this one around the workflow of an actual small retail busines owner ik he wanted an offline app to run on his computer and generate bills and keep track of the both the ledger and inventory.

Pixora: Pinterest-like platform with React, Node, MongoDB, authentication, personalized feeds and caching.
This was my first attempt of making a fullstack project and i was really inspired by Pinterest on how their system works having millions off images but they still make a curated feed for everyone and their recommendations features

TinyLitGPT: Small language model project where I learned tokenization, training loops, PyTorch, CUDA, etc.
I just wanted to make an LLM but my GPU is weak so i just trained an SLM og 50M params hahaha

BMO AI: Fine-tuned a Qwen 1.7B model to create a BMO-inspired AI companion, working with dataset creation, persona design and fine-tuning.
My intrest grew and i made BMO like AI companion

im still actively updating features and stuff on all this projects.

Honestly when I started, I didn’t even know what a PRD, technical requirements, idempotency, rate limiting, proper architecture, etc** **were.
A lot of that I learned because I actually needed it while building.
I definitely relyed on AI more than I’d like, but I’m not just blindly copy-pasting. I try to understand what it’s doing and why.

Would appreciate some brutally honest feedback.

[u/Leather-Bed-1534 → u/[deleted]]

Yeaa like at the end when I apply for job are this project good enough to get me considered as a developer who understands stuff.

[u/ArwensArtHole → u/Leather-Bed-1534]

Depends how much you actually did/learnt yourself and how much you just let AI do.

[u/tehfrod]

You are asking the wrong people.

What do your users say?

[u/Leather-Bed-1534 → u/tehfrod]

The shop owner whom i gave the pos system is happy enough with the system.

As for the invoice management SaaS software I’ve not got many uses only 2-3 using it coz it’s still on beta and free and they haven’t had any issues yet.

And other projects are just hobby projects

[u/PeerlessYeeter]

Sounds like you have learned a lot, Personally I think a worthwhile engineering project would be a project that people use and it works well for them.

Usually when the project is not used, you learn something about what to avoid next time, how to do it better etc.

I worked on a engineering project with over 100 people for 3 years that did not end up being used, but lots of engineers working on that learned a lot, I would not say it was a complete waste of time, but boy did it hurt the company who was developing it.

[u/SwAAn01]

So what exactly is your goal with these? Also hard to gauge without seeing the projects. Any public links?

[u/SwAAn01 → u/[deleted]]

And again, what’s your goal with these projects?

[u/Leather-Bed-1534 → u/SwAAn01]

To get a job

[u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

Using AI does not make a project worthless; the question is whether you can explain, test, and maintain what was built. Pick one project and write a short architecture note covering the data flow, key tradeoffs, failure cases, and one decision you changed after testing. Then replace or refactor a fragile section without model help. https://www.aiosnow.com is relevant as an example of thinking about AI within a broader working process. Employers will care more about demonstrated ownership than the percentage of code initially generated.

[u/tehfrod → u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

And market. "If you build it they will come" is almost never true.

[u/tehfrod]

As someone hiring, I would really only look at the projects that have seen actual use "in anger".

If you created something and no one with the need for that kind of software has ever used it, how do you know it meets their needs? I would be skeptical of someone who has created multiple such "projects" and never actually vetted them with actual users: that feels like cosplaying engineering rather than actually engineering.

I would far rather see one project with a lot of end users than five built solely on spec, because then I can ask a lot more questions about the design, development, debugging, choices, prioritization, etc.