aswain91

Some other things that you could add to your tool belt are testing and testing frameworks, documentation "standards" (standards being defined by your org), and telling when a class, function, or script is starting to get to large, and needs to be broken out. The best ways to learn these skills is on the job. Since competition is fierce I would look to some sort of professional system that allows you to begin to ask these questions. Like working in a tech based call center, or working in a QA department, or taking some courses at a local community college. Going to reddit, and stack overflow might not be the best way to get thins information as there are a lot of people who don't post useful insights or information there. Youtube would also be a great place to get some exposure to these skills, just finding the right video.

I will say that by using ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot I have been able to spin up from basically nothing and little to no understanding of the tech to a FastAPI and SQLModle BE, a React Native FE with working API calls, log in/out authentication and a bunch of app features in 5 weeks. Learning and growing, reading documentation and asking the LLM's for help and input. I again feel super productive but also feel a little like a sham as I did maybe 40% of the actual coding. I feel that the prompt engineering part is true but if the person prompting the LLM can't understand the code then eventually the LLM will break things and the dev will have to fill in. I feel that things will get more like this as time passes. Soon it will be engineers prompting LLM's for the actual code and preforming minor fixes to the code spat out.

As someone in the same position as you I would say it's more like winning the lottery. The game environment is filled with games so adding another one to the pile won't do much. I think making a video game is a great idea. Having myself coded a web browser game in JS its a lot easier now with all the tools and game engines available then it was 7 years ago. I would say that you should go for it. Build your game and release it. The market for crafting survival/ slice of life/ crafting games is huge and you definitely could make the next game to take the world by storm. I would recommend not quitting your day job though, unless you find a way to cover life expenses and build the game.

Also the material, lessons, and courses in Hacker Rank and the Odin Project are great resources.

I feel that for large basic scaffolding or a quick spin up of a framework or application structure is a great use of AI coding tools. Currently getting the tools to hold a lot of code in memory and extrapolate on the functionality tends to lead to a fall off of actually working code in my experience. I also know that using the tools to help solve a problem you are stuck on or something that you can not seem to get right is a good use. To prevent you from spending hours and hours trying to figure out something that a few prompts to an AI tool and some quick testing could figure out. IMHO I feel that current AI tools are great for moving things along in specific situations. Feeling like you're loosing your edge is natural when a tool comes along and shifts the way a job is completed. I feel that if you can understand the code the AI tool writes and you can test and implement the code then it's the same as having a someone else with more expierane write the code.

Salary should not usually be withheld. In my opinion if the salary is being withheld it is because the salary is low and the recruiter knows, or the company is not willing to share the salary because it is lower than market value. The reason the recruiter withholds the end company is so that you don't go and apply to the position with out the recruiter and they loose out on a pay day by getting you through their firm.