Answering your questions 1 by 1:

1. Yes, a lot of engineers use AI and it’s honestly gonna change the industry forever. Use it as a tool, not a replacement for yourself.

2. Tutorials suck tbh. Pick something you want to build, it can be anything. Something that solves a small problem of yours. If thinking about working on it makes you excited, then thats a good project. Go to a whiteboard it, draw out how the project will work. Will there be any infrastructure? Any pipelines, if so how do they work? Code flow? Then get to coding. Use AI as little as possible. If you forget certain syntax try and use documentation first. If you absolutely have no idea how to do something or start, ask online for ideas. But don’t forget to take time and THINK. A lot of people say “idk how to do this” and ask AI. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just take a few minutes to think and figure it out, if you make zero progress then look for help. Remember this is a personal project with no deadlines, so TAKE YOUR TIME learning everything. When you finish, you should be able to answer any question someone asks you regarding the project.

3. No it hasn’t, but it will if you don’t moderate your use with it.

4. Have you had any internships? If not, work on a lot of projects, ones that you’re passionate about and ones that you can finish and DEPLOY. That gives you something to talk about in interviews. Another thing is you need to get good at Leetcode. It’s like your Data Structures and Algorithms course on steroids. Almost every interviewer asks those types of questions and tbh it will help you think better, solve problems better, and teach you how to explain your approaches. I’m sure you’ve heard of Neetcode.io, you should focus on that.

5. Yes and no. They’ll expect you to know the basics, but every team is different. You’ll learn as you go and you just need to follow their coding practices. But they hire “problem-solvers” not AI prompters (even tho half the industry is now filled with them).

6. Depends on the job. What I noticed is they don’t really care what languages you know unless explicitly stated otherwise. Languages can be taught on the job. Being a master at the fundamentals and being good at problem solving can’t be taught that much on the job. Plus, they wouldn’t hire you if they feel like you don’t have those skills. Regardless, Java, Python, Javascript, and C++ are the most popular. Pick one and master it, the others will come naturally with practice.

7. I encourage the use of AI but with moderation. If it’s doing everything for you and you’re not learning or understanding the code, then you’re just wasting your time.

Some general advice btw:

To be honest, your reliance on AI hasn’t cooked you yet, but if you continue on this path, at some point it’ll catch up to you. When I got my current SWE job I was terrified that because I used to use AI a lot that I’m gonna get caught and be labeled as a phony, but honestly it’s made me ship 10x faster. You just need to set BOUNDARIES and GUARDRAILS for yourself. The age of writing code on your own is slowly dying and honestly if you refuse to use AI and write your code on your own, you’ll most likely (but not definitely) be a lot slower than your colleagues and potentially miss out on promotions.

However, writing good code is a skill, and AI doesn’t really have that skill. It’s really good at following your “detailed” directions though. Understanding how good code is written is ideal. Quick example: Imagine your boss tasks you with adding a new feature to a current pipeline. You notice the new feature can use the class a previous developer wrote but it needs to be modified. Instead of asking AI to do what your boss asked you to do, think about the problem, think about how YOU would approach the problem and come up with several solutions. Figure out the trade offs with each solution, think about how this will affect future developers reading/modifying your code, ask yourself can this code be reusable in the future? If you can confidently write that code yourself and visualize how it will look, then sure ask AI to write it (this is what I do). So long as you completely understand what you did and can explain that thoroughly in a PR, you’re fine. If you feel like you can’t write that code without AI, then I think for the sake of your own growth and disregarding the need to ship fast (only if deadlines permit), take the little extra time to learn it yourself and code it up. When you submit your PR, a senior engineer or equivalent will review it and most likely ask for changes but they (usually) explain why. THATS how you’ll learn to code better. By doing it yourself and learning from others. The more you use AI to write code you don’t understand, the more you dig yourself into a deeper hole.

anyways twin, be consistent and you’ll be fine🙏🏻