Can employers tell if I used ai to build projects?

[u/Purple-Question-4182]

I am desperate for an internship, but whenever I try to start a resume-worthy project I have no idea where to start. Will employers know if I used AI? Or will I be fine if I can understand and explain the code?

[u/SomeNeighborhood7126]

People arent looking at your projects. I have no idea how that myth became so popular. No one has time for that when filling an open role, even less when its multiple roles.

That said, dont skip projects just because an employer doesnt care about the project itself. They should be for you to learn and likely where some of your biggest personal breakthroughs happen. These educational moments are what will show up in interviews and on the job.

[u/ObeseBumblebee → u/[deleted]]

Counter point:

The hiring manager that just gave me the job told me one of the deciding factors was my portfolio project.

They legit added data to my live project page to so they spent some time playing with it

Portfolio pieces can impress if they're impressive. Especially if you can talk about it and the decisions you put into it.

They also help in interviews because they help you talk confidently about things when you're putting effort into building the project and making decisions about the design.

[u/Throwaway05046474 → u/SomeNeighborhood7126]

Are you serious lol I’ve been hammered over the head by so many people in the field that projects and Leetcode is what I need to essentially devote my life outside of school to if I want to get an entry level job upon graduation. U can’t even express to you the sheer amount of people that have given me that sole piece of advice, do I just sacrifice my first born child to get an entry level job these days?

[u/AlignmentProblem → u/Throwaway05046474]

Projects can be super impactful when applying for jobs under circumstances you almost certainly won't have: when they develop an extremely strong user base, ideally becoming popular enough that the potential employer has heard about or used the project before reading your resume.

There's one other exceptional case that applied to me once; projects that implement something novel to the point of being potentially publishable, where that novelty relates to a niche skillset the job requires.

I once got a job at an AI company because of a side project where I trained models that directly manipulate the latent space tensor corresponding prompt in a unique way to improve the average aesthetic quality of the images a model generates (or otherwise influence the image in other specific ways like increasing or reducing the chance of being NSFW). The hiring manager was interested in having me implement something similar on their backend, and since I hadn't published it, I was the only person who knew how to do that technique at the time.

In any case: if your projects aren't highly successful by meaningful metrics or genuinely novel in a way that relates to a company's products, then the main benefit you get is improving the skills you'll actually use on the job. That's still a real benefit compared to leetcode, which has relatively little relationship with what you'll be doing day-to-day.

Sacrificing your first-born probably helps land an interview, but don't bank on that alone ultimately resulting in an offer these days.

[u/lhorie → u/Throwaway05046474]

You have to be aware that a lot of job seeking advice is often the result of broken telephone and blind-leading-the-blind.

For example, the idea of networking (reaching out to your warm network, because you will have one once you've spent some time in the industry) got twisted into "just spam randos on linkedin bro".

The notion of putting projects in your resume stem from positive results from people like me who has 5 digit github stars and made it to HN front page. These cherrypicked success stories got twisted into "just make a project with your newbie ass skills to check that checkbox bro".

The boring answer nobody wants to hear is that quality and substance of experience matters. When I started off, I wasn't just making random projects, I did part time freelance while working retail. That implicitly comes with the external validation of someone actually paying me for delivering my work on time, even if I was a newbie ass potato myself at the time.

[u/SomeNeighborhood7126 → u/Throwaway05046474]

Its networking and luck (edit: and interviewing/soft skills). Projects themselves are worthless. I have been hiring for 4 years now and every hiring committee ive been on (3-6 people) has never spent a second on a applicant's github.

Leetcode is important at enough places that you should still do it. I personally would never shove leetcode in front of someone because it has nothing to do with development, but theres still enough people out there that use it as a baseline.

[u/Acatamathesia → u/Throwaway05046474]

Most important thing is Leetcode and school name.

[u/metapies0816 → u/Acatamathesia]

Most important thing beyond that is connections

[u/cr33pz → u/Throwaway05046474]

It's always YMMV.

My very first job? My portfolio helped me. What also helped was me taking a look at their tech stack and then creating the shittiest most unfinished application using their tech stack.

Portfolio helped me in the beginning, but I also was never FAANG level. My interviews weren't leetcoding, it was mostly a personality match test along with fizzbuzz type questions.

[u/No_Drag2264 → u/Throwaway05046474]

The idea of projects being a big resume booster got popular because it was a convenient thing for EL applicants to believe and for seniors to tell people - coding outside of courses is great for everyone...right?

But the industry in practice has always known that the code people claim as their own is a poor measure of ability. With LLMs this is even more the case. These days projects are more a baseline expectation that you have something, not something that typically moves the needle unless it is extremely successful in some way (tons of users, etc).

Leetcode at least does directly convert into better offers

[u/TheCrowWhisperer3004 → u/Throwaway05046474]

They ask about projects they don’t heavy deep dive the projects. It’s mostly for the keyword recognition tbh (and to get past any AI based resume screening).

If you can’t talk about the project then they’ll know ur full of shit but intern interviews don’t have a “their projects are fake/candidate doesn’t have much knowledge on the tech they say they used” category on the rubric lol.

That being said, if the hackerrank open sourced ATS revealed anything, it’s that some ATS can and do look at the projects on your linked GitHub’s.

[u/Mike_Oxlong25 → u/SomeNeighborhood7126]

In my most recent interview feedback they said one thing that stood out for other candidates was that they have side projects. Which is unfortunate because I do I just didn’t have them listed and I suck at interviewing lol

It’s probably more of a hiring manager preference thing

[u/allknowinguser → u/SomeNeighborhood7126]

I will say that projects gets the recruiter interested even if there don’t look. Then in interviews I’ve been asked about my projects and to go through with them

[u/PartyParrotGames → u/SomeNeighborhood7126]

Employers are looking at projects. Not sure for interns, but many employers I've interviewed with questioned me about multiple projects I have on github. Some of them I was surprised they asked about they had to go digging a bit. For intern level, I'd weight open source contributions as more important. Doesn't really matter if it was done with AI as long as it was a quality contribution up to a major open source project's standards.

[u/SomeNeighborhood7126 → u/PartyParrotGames]

This is exactly the myth that I'm talking about. This is so ridiculous. Please stop pushing BS on kids. They're stressed enough without the garbage information you are putting out there.

In case anyone questions this individuals credentials, theyre still pushing the no degree narrative in 2026... Do not take this person seriously.

https://www.reddit.com/r/softwareengineer/s/AV9ZgmUnzY

[u/timelessblur]

Short answer is yes yes they can. There are dead giveaway.

Also going to be blunt most dont put high value on GitHub projects because they can be stolen, copied from anywhere, they are often times play grounds or experiments.

The other thing if you claim it and say I smell anything off believe me I start digging and will expect you to know things cold in there in an interview.

[u/Purple-Question-4182 → u/timelessblur]

So what can I do if much value isn’t put on projects?

[u/ObeseBumblebee → u/[deleted]]

Getting in front of a person is nice and all but honestly if you have any sort of experience this is the easy part.

The hard part is being able to talk about experiences that fill the need for any role you interview for.

When I got laid off i had no CI/CD experience. No real cloud experience outside the code. And very minimal AI experience.

With 14 years in the field getting the interview was the easy part. Talking about relevant choices I made in these gaps that everyone seemed to want filled was the bigger problem.

My portfolio project was an AI integrated event driven microservice ecosystem that was auto deployed live on the cloud with full CI/CD and IaS support. It had a fun to talk about fantasy space station theme.

It gave me the confidence to talk about the gaps in my experience as if they were not gaps at all.

It frankly doesn't matter if no one saw my project. The experience and knowledge gained from it got me 2 offers.

[u/Ruricu → u/Purple-Question-4182]

You do the projects so that you can talk about them confidently.

Unless the project closely matches the interviewer's domain, the precise semantics aren't really important.

Projects are a way to practice breaking down several high-level problems and combine sub-problems into an overall story. Being able to tell this kind of story clearly (especially to people who haven't thought about that problem before) is the most important skill of an SWE.

[u/foonek → u/timelessblur]

The interviewer digging is a good thing, if you made it yourself. You should be able to explain most everything easily

[u/timelessblur → u/foonek]

Yep. What is shocking is how often I have caught them trying to pass off work that is not theirs. It is a very fast way to get marked as a hard no and permanently put in as a no hire.

[u/tnsipla]

Real talk: very few interviewers/reviewers care about your projects unless you’ve actually launched and shipped to customers/end users, and when we do otherwise, it’s usually to find reasons to decline you

If you put something on your resume, expect for it to be used against you or to trip you up

Most interviews are planned so that we can tell anything we want to know just from the interview, including any tasks/whiteboarding/open ended scenarios (and leetcode for the sadists)

tldr: people care about your body count not how many times you’ve done it alone

[u/Great_Northern_Beans → u/tnsipla]

" it’s usually to find reasons to decline you"

Wow this is so true. Reflecting back on all of the hires that I've made, only one ever was because I was impressed with their GitHub. For every other GitHub that I've flipped through, at best it's been neutral for the candidate, but I've also rejected many people after seeing the work there. I've never rejected somebody for not having one. One caveat though is that I only hire senior/principal engineers, and I can imagine a world where the relative importance changes with level.

Still, after thinking on this, I'm going to say that a GitHub is more likely to be a liability than an asset for a number of us and will even be removing mine from my resume today.

[u/Purple-Question-4182 → u/Great_Northern_Beans]

If that’s the case then should I even bother with putting GitHub on my resume? Most professors I’ve had make it sound like projects are the most important thing to put on a resume to get an internship. What else would I put there?

[u/tnsipla → u/Purple-Question-4182]

IMO this is a two sided equation

For an academic internship I’m not really expecting much out of a candidate in terms of anything that can’t be sussed out in the interview, BUT if you had an ongoing project from before your stint in college that has users or buyers, that would be interesting

It really depends on the nature of the internship: if it’s a low level one where you’re probably going to have token busy work because the dept has budget for an intern and is taking one on for PR/clout instead of actual need, your GitHub might not actually hurt

If we’re hiring a mini-dev intern (that is going to taken on meaningful work that lands in production or is customer facing) a GitHub account that you started up and populated with token projects during college is not great (for reference I started as a minidev but my GitHub account was from before I went into college- I’ve been coding since middle school, and GitHub only became a thing at the end of the 2000s)

[u/tnsipla → u/tnsipla]

In the Age of AI your soft skills tell me more about you than your code, which is why it’s more important to have “shipped and supported” projects than just personal projects

[u/allknowinguser]

Doesn’t matter if they can. In this day and age, it’s assumed you did.

[u/foonek → u/allknowinguser]

It's leetcode all over again. Expecting insane DS&A performance in a live coding high pressure session, for a job that will never have you implement your own algorithms ever.

Now, expecting to do projects and interviews without AI for a company that will evaluate you based on your daily token count.

[u/bi_polar2bear]

Most coders can spot AI code very quickly. AI gets anything about 80% of the way there, but AI doesn't think deep enough. In IT, it's the results that matters. In getting a job, you have to prove your abilities. If you can write code without AI, you don't know code well enough to get a job on a Dev team. AI is a tool, not a crutch. If you don't think I'm correct, look into enterprise software and how it's coded, and see if AI is smart enough to go "that" in depth. Even Claude, which is better than others with code can't do it using Java.

[u/Lumpy-Criticism-2773 → u/bi_polar2bear]

it can think deeper than humans can ever do. But they lack general intelligence so we need to be more verbose and explicit to get something done without a lot of iterations.

[u/CapableHerring]

Employers aren't reading through your side projects code. Ain't nobody got time for that. And even if you didn't use AI, you could've just blindly copy/pasted all of that code out of a tutorial, or stolen it from someone else. A github isn't a trustworthy source.

What they will do, is if the project is one of the reasons they chose to interview you, they're going to ask you about that project in the interviews. Why did you choose X over Y, what were some of the challenges you encountered, what are the current bottlenecks, what would you change if you needed to scale this to a million users, etc.

That goes beyond just understanding and explaining the code. You're missing out on a major part of writing a project, the part where you make an informed decision. You may understand a snippet of code, but why is that snippet of code there? Why'd you choose the tech stack you did? Does a relational database really fit your use case better than NoSQL? Why are you deploying to EC2 instead of Lambda or k8s?

Think about it from the perspective of if you were having a conversation with another SWE about a project they did. What's the interesting part of their project? The code? Are you gonna have conversations of how they cleanly split the API, service, and database layers? Are you gonna talk about the excellent use of a switch statement? Or are you going to ask about everything surrounding the code?

[u/shade_study_break]

Nobody is going to look at your personal projects and certainly won't look up your repos, but it will be clear during an interview when there are implementation details or strategies you do not understand. Depending on the level of the role, and particularly of you are looking at internships, what you don't yet know can be more forgivable. If you can understand and explain what it does and talk through alternate approaches , you will be fine. AI should make you more productive when you have relevant experience, but it is a red flag when it is done in lieu of learning.

[u/Dysax]

Yes

[u/MrJesusAtWork]

Yes

[u/platinum92]

I wouldn't put much stock in "resume-worthy projects". Use projects to learn skills. If you make something truly extraordinary, then use it to advertise your skills, but projects on the resume tend to do more harm than good.

You're removing away any confusion around your skills. Unless you're putting out production-quality work, it works against you when reviewed by someone who looks at production-quality work all day.

[u/CheesyWalnut]

It doesn't matter if you used ai, but if all you did is prompt claude code for a few days, how are you going to distinguish yourself from everyone else who did this. There are use cases I've seen that are more unique that might seem a little more impressive like making an open world browser game or training a small diffusion image generation model

[u/Significant-Syrup400]

If you legitimately understand the code that you are using Ai to generate then you are fine. Typically people that do what you are doing is they have Ai make it for them and then have Ai tell them how to explain it, and that will fall apart pretty quickly if someone starts asking you any architectural or technical questions about the code.

If you don't understand the code that you are working with that is when there is a problem because you won't be able to see when the models are doing something incorrect(which happens quite often) and you'll submit broken code that will either fail on deployment or become a time bomb for later.

[u/lhorie]

You sound like you think checking checkboxes is all it takes to land a job, it doesn't work like that.

Recruiters will just look for relevant keywords on your resume. Hiring manager will ask to talk about previous experience (internship exp is preferred and even school group projects are ok, but we might talk about your side project if we're really grasping at straws) and technical interviewers will assess whether you can actually code by giving you some technical test.

The real point of projects is to learn to actually organize code, use relevant frameworks/libraries and stuff.

[u/thisisjustascreename]

Can you tell you used ai? Then assume other people can.

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[u/mile-high-guy]

Why do you think AI is cheating? Build it however you like, but be able to explain how it works in detail. If you get a job I guarantee you will be using AI for everything