What projects in my portfolio won't count?

Q: What projects in my portfolio won't count?

Three kinds, and recruiters spot all three in seconds. Cloned tutorial repos. If you downloaded the instructor's code, customized it, and executed it, it's not your project. Thousands of applicants have the same repo with the same structure, and the first interview question about it ("why did you build it this way?") exposes that you can't explain how it works. Projects vibe-coded with Claude Code or Copilot. Same problem, newer flavor. The AI made the decisions, so you can't defend them. Use AI tools to build faster, but only ship projects where you can explain every architecture choice as your own. Projects that never shipped. A notebook on your laptop, code that only ran on localhost, a repo with no live demo. If a recruiter can't click it, it doesn't exist as proof. The test for every project before it goes in your portfolio: is it deployed at a real URL, and can you walk through it decision by decision? Pass both, and it counts.

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Accepted Answer

Three kinds, and recruiters spot all three in seconds.

Cloned tutorial repos. If you downloaded the instructor's code, customized it, and executed it, it's not your project. Thousands of applicants have the same repo with the same structure, and the first interview question about it ("why did you build it this way?") exposes that you can't explain how it works.

Projects vibe-coded with Claude Code or Copilot. Same problem, newer flavor. The AI made the decisions, so you can't defend them. Use AI tools to build faster, but only ship projects where you can explain every architecture choice as your own.

Projects that never shipped. A notebook on your laptop, code that only ran on localhost, a repo with no live demo. If a recruiter can't click it, it doesn't exist as proof.

The test for every project before it goes in your portfolio: is it deployed at a real URL, and can you walk through it decision by decision? Pass both, and it counts.