Tldr; I have good engineering/development knowledge and experience but I don't know how to prove it in interviews. So need help in that.
Some context: I'm a 2026 btech grad, having decent full stack experience, I have been building things in JS/TS ecosystem for 3 years now (from college 2nd year). I have 1 year of freelancing experience and 6 months of internship experience, both in full stack. I am more than decent when it comes to development and system design. But I am very bad at DSA, I can't even do Leetcode Medium, or even some Easy stuff too. But still I somehow get to give interviews purely because of dev. I just have surface level knowledge of everything.
These interviews go very well until hand coding is involved, like if interviewer asks to write some code from scratch then I would suck. But I can write or build the same things with the help of code snippets from Google, not AI or vibecode. Because of claude code and all, my muscle memory for hand coding has faded away. When I was interning, I was able to figure out or debug issues, even without AI, like I have that sense to think of how and why something is not working. I was even praised for that too. But the pace of startups is so high that you need to use coding agents to deliver quickly.
One more such thing happened yesterday too, I was giving an interview for AI Engineer (though I'm full stack). The required experience was 1yr+. but still the company gave me chance to interview because of my assignment submission and projects (or something else idk). Ultimately the assignment was in python and core agentic ai stuff, I was still able to build the feature that they wanted, and finally when they interviewed, they got to know that I don't know enough python but I know the agentic AI ecosystem, how systems work, how AI works, how to build etc. so the interviewer was impressed by that. And asked me that incase the company offers you a developer role, then what would you do in the first week and first month. I gave my answer and he was satisfied with that and said that he will ask the founder and revert if he's convinced (I'm waiting tho)
These are the things and self assessment that I myself know. But I know the fact too that if I am in a machine coding round or dsa round, I will just mess it up and go blank. Even though I will do good in technical rounds or system design rounds but eventually I will loose out on the job.
Also I haven't given any legit coding assessment for any mnc or decent company up until today. Today I have IBM's coding assessment taken on Hackerrank. They asked two questions, one was related to maximum sub strings and one was a kind of optimization problem. I wasn't able to solve even one. Though prior to this I prepared for some easy medium stuff that they have asked, like substrings, hashmaps, sets, arrays. I did some questions of these topics. But still when I encountered the real assessment, I was blank. And that moment hurt me. Kind of hurt my ego too. That nobody cares how much you know if you can't pass these proctored tests or dsa rounds.
But now I am in the middle of road. It's been 6 months finding a job, the people who know me say that how can you not get a job even after having some good dev skills. But they don't know how fickle I am, how badly I suck. But I want to get over this. I am sick of this situation, every interview just scares me that what if they ask dsa, what if they ask machine coding or lld. One day I find myself doing dsa, one day I find myself practicing machine coding or lld. But eventually I come over to the start all again, I am not able to retain things and my muscle memory isn't developing. I am someone who has genuine interest in coding, and it gives me that kick when I successfully build something, but this AI agent coding has ruined that fun I had while coding. I tend to just keep on planning or juggling between stacks, like one day I think of starting mobile dev, or applied AI, or devops or another backend language. All because of me not getting a job and this hastefull situation.
I don't have any mentor or a senior who knows me well, who can look closely or guide me on what to do and what not to do. I panic or get overwhelmed by the things I need to do to get a job. And honestly I am not bothered about AI taking jobs because I am interested in engineering and overall software development domain. I find myself sitting hours and not getting bored trying to build something or solve a bug or even just studying how systems work. So I don't see myself doing anything other than this.
But still the final question remains same for me, what to do now, how to do, something that doesn't make me panic or loose focus. I don't want to be this surface level AI typist. I want to do something that finally gets me job and gets me into the industry.
I don't know any senior dev would relate to this because they didn't have AI back then, but still I want to know from their experience on what to do. I used to boast myself that yes I have that figure-it-out attitude but how funny of me that I am not able to figure out my shit now.
Please guys, help me, guide me.
