Genuine question for software engineers: How do you become job-ready in this market?

[u/H99daly]

I've been away from programming for a couple of months now. I've built a dozen simple projects, both web and mobile, and deployed a few basic web apps to Vercel, but I've never shipped anything serious to production.

I constantly feel like I'm not good enough. With the current job market and AI changing the way people write code, I'm stuck between two approaches. Some people say to focus on fundamentals and learn to code everything yourself, while others say to learn agentic AI and adapt to how the industry works now.

For context, I studied software engineering at university. I'm neither a complete beginner nor an experienced developer. I've done a few small freelance projects, mainly for other university students, but nothing particularly complex.

My problem is that I understand a lot of concepts, but I struggle to implement them from scratch. For example:

I know what Nginx is, but I've never actually configured or used it.

I understand what useRef does, but I'd probably struggle to implement it correctly in a real project without looking things up.

I understand idempotency, but I've never implemented an idempotency key in a POST request.

I know Redis and its basic data structures (strings, sets, lists), as well as caching and Pub/Sub, but I've never used them in a real project.

I understand some software design principles, but sometimes I still struggle to write relatively simple code without getting stuck.

It feels a lot like tutorial hell: I know what things are, I understand the concepts, and I can follow along with examples, but when it comes to building something independently, I struggle.

I really need a job, and I don't know how to approach this situation.

Should I spend the next few months strengthening my fundamentals and repeatedly building things from scratch without AI, or should I start learning AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows to align with what the market expects?

How would you approach this if you were in my position and trying to land an entry-level software engineering job in today's market?

I'd genuinely appreciate advice from developers who have been through this stage or who are involved in hiring junior developers.

[u/DiscountApart4085]

Become an "AI native" software engineer, invest in a 200$ claude subscription for a month, and build a complex project from scratch. And work on its deployment, its observability, its scalability..

That's what is needed in the market today, engineers that worked on AI, especially in production, as you can't have that without an actual job, the minimum you can do on your side is build something like I have described, to have. the line in the resume that you have been building your own thing and it's in production and is used bye people.

That's how I would have done it if I were not lucky enough to be able to do it in my job.