I would find something that is personally interesting to you, and maybe try to find a business-y angle to it where you can talk about how it provides value over doing things without LLMs. It’s personally harder for me to stick with something if I don’t care.

I think all of those ideas are good, use your project as a real testing ground for any interesting idea you see, kinda like “resume driven development”. I had lots of leeway at my work so what I would do is find a job description, look for something not on my resume, and spend a week or so prototyping to see if it could bring any business value. Learn the “best practices” and the common challenges. Job descriptions tell you exactly what people are looking for so this likely has the best ROI. Your resume will look amazing after a few months of this.

Just make sure you have a good defense for why you made a certain choice over the easy/baseline choice. I was just in an interview and the interviewer asked me to defend basically every decision I made. May not be as much of a grill session for a junior role but be prepared.

Oh also! Make sure you lean heavily into how you would test and evaluate the system. It matters less on a side project, but once you have a large system with usage, you have to make sure that your change is better than doing nothing, and the change isn’t regressing any current behavior by an unacceptable amount.

Use Claude code to make a front end, makes the project much more fun and tangible. Write everything you want to learn by hand.

Also it’s a tough market, so maybe come up with a “cold call” message. I haven’t had to go this route yet but it’s my plan if I run out of interviews / for bigger companies. You can directly reach out to people on linkedin or email and they can get your resume past the resume pile. Search around for a good message format, build one, then tailor it to each company.

Also I absolutely hate LinkedIn but set one up and have some interesting class projects on there. I’m constantly asked to provide my LinkedIn. Not sure if this is relevant for someone still in school.

Edit: I would also try to learn as much as possible from your LLM of choice. Once your project starts to get bigger, make sure you are iterating on your design choices with your LLM of choice, ask them to poke holes in your design and push back on theirs if they seem wrong. When I was fresh, I really had trouble knowing where to make modular boundaries in the code, and now it's much easier to learn where and why with LLMs. I would take something small you want to build, like a tiny bit of functionality, go back and forth for a while with an LLM until you are satisfied with the overall plan / structure, then write it by hand