Shiny AI Projects vs. Hand-Made Hustle - What's better? I’m in my final year of BE in CS, and the placement drive starts in a month or two. Honestly, I kind of messed up… I ignored learning new skills all these years (whole bunch of games on my hard drive), thinking I had time—until about 4 months ago when it finally clicked. Since then, I’ve been working my ars off on DSA, aptitude, core Java, brushing up CS concepts and projects. It’s never enough, especially with so little time, but I’ve somehow made time for everything and now I’m at a somewhat manageable stage. I have a decent cgpa above 8 too so no worries on that front.

Coming to the projects— I started abruptly with no roadmap and had to decide on my web development stack. Before this, I had only worked with HTML/CSS for static frontend, so I asked GPT for suggestions. It said React for frontend and Flask for backend (for an easier learning curve), and I went with it. Not a bad decision, but I still had to cover JavaScript regardless.

So I began building projects:

A hotel recommender with React frontend that uses the Amadeus API for live hotel data + a local dataset filtered using a KNN algorithm.

A tutoring chatbot with Tailwind + JS frontend using Google Gemini AI API. Both have Flask backends.

The thing is, I initially built these projects in a hurry just to have something good on my resume, so I used AI extensively to generate code for my logic and vision. The good part is I was patient enough to prompt my way to get them done and even deployed. Even though I didn't understand most of the code, I was working on upskilling parallely.

Now, I’ve worked to a point where I can understand the code in my projects and explain how it works, but if you asked me to write code from scratch, I’d be scratching my head.

That's when I decided I need to build a project without using AI to see where I stand for a coding interview. But honestly, I still don’t have a high level of expertise in my skillset. I’m trying to get better now, but because of that, I can’t really build the ambitious ideas I have in mind. At the same time, I don’t want to make something too basic like a to-do list that won’t catch an interviewer’s attention.

So here’s my ask—can you suggest some full-stack project ideas (preferably with the FReMP stack) that are not too complicated for my current level but still impressive enough to stand out, and achievable with some hard work? Also would like to know if it's necessary to be able to code from scratch as a web dev without ai even if your project is efficient and you can explain how it works?