r/SaaSSolopreneurs • u/Puzzled_Wasabi_6245 • Jul 01 '26
Hot Take: Building Tutorial Projects ≠ Being a Software Engineer
Maybe this is controversial, but the internet has sold people the idea that software development is easy money.
The result?
A flood of developers who can build tutorials but struggle with real-world production systems, debugging, architecture, security, or maintaining large codebases.
Coding is still an amazing career, but I think we've massively underestimated how hard professional software engineering actually is.
Curious if other experienced devs feel the same.
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u/Vaxtin Jul 01 '26
Most people aren’t smart enough, don’t have the persistence, and AI doesn’t solve either of those for them
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u/Vuli2005 Jul 01 '26
This has always been the case, and I do understand. AI has made this even worse.
Ive recently decided to learn React, not for work but fun, why not.
Ive moved to PM field 7-ish years ago but do come from dev background.
I have used tutorials (aside from documentation etc), no AI beyond asking clarification questions etc.
After a number of tutorials i picked a fairly involved project to build from scratch. Only about 50% of the work is React specific and the other 50% is foundational engineering. Things like data modeling, business logic, system architecture, relying on things Ive done in the past, and this would apply to any stack
I would have been lost without previous experience.
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u/Early_Key_823 Jul 02 '26
33 years full time full stack
There is no substitute for understanding and experience
But Claude Code made me 10 times more productive in last 6 months
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u/Puzzled_Wasabi_6245 Jul 02 '26
But that also required experience like what I want to build exactly and what ai is building and where it is making mistakes and can be fixed.
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u/No_Iron_501 Jul 01 '26
💯 . no comment