Is the era of personal software portfolios over?
I personally view software a bit different now than I did over 3 years ago. The technical or architectural aspects is not as interesting to me anymore, since they could have been generated with the help of AI. This does not tell me that the person actually knows what is happening beneath the business layer, since the person might not have been the one who actually wrote it. Yeah that was doable before too with the help of almighty CTRL-C CTRL-V, but now we have an automated CTRL-C CTRL-V which rarely pastes the code in the wrong location.
Although I feel that when a specific scale is reached for an application, AI does not suffice anyway. That means the person actually requires to have deep architectural understandings of the concepts required to solve these problems, which was kind of the requirement before AI era. But does that just means I now value more ambitious software lower?
The current era of software development is quite shaky and weird IMO, and no one actually knows, everything is just an opinion-war.
So here goes my opinion. Has the rise of these tools lowered the value of personal software portfolios? What do you think?
Partially, yes. If your portfolio is 5 small web applications or Python scripts that AI can make in half an hour, their weight as a “demonstration of skills” drops.So, the fact that you can do it manually is no longer impressive.
What becomes important now: Architecture at scale — AI does not yet know all the nuances of large systems, distributed services, performance optimization, and security.
Business logic integration — understanding how the business actually works, where the pain points are, how users interact with the product.
Creativity and unique concepts — AI can create boilerplate, but it doesn't always understand that it is creating something fundamentally new.
Moral: AI takes away the “simple feats” but opens up new space for true engineering mavens. If you can do something that AI can’t easily replicate, your portfolio gets even cooler.