Lately, whenever I talk to friends about job hunting, an absurd sense of anxiety always seems to hang in the air. Open social media today, and you’re bombarded with slogans like “10x your development speed with AI” or “Build an app in three minutes.” Even I’ve become increasingly reliant on pure vibe coding.

Before 2024, when I wanted to build a feature, I’d still think through which snippet of code to feed to GPT and ask how that specific part should be handled. Back then, I was at least engaging my brain to pinpoint the root cause, even if the execution was a bit crude.

Since returning to Taipei from Europe last July, downloading Cursor in August, and now witnessing a booming landscape with Claude Code, Antigravity, and Codex, one realization has become impossible to ignore:

The perceived utility of software engineers seems to be diminishing at an exponential rate.

Yet at the same time, something else has happened.

On the job hunt—or anywhere you need to prove you’re better than the competition—we’ve found that working hours haven’t gotten shorter, and quality of life hasn’t improved. Instead, the industry’s expectations of human talent have inflated in lockstep with these marketing slogans—if not far outpaced them.

It used to be that spending two or three months polishing a decent side project earned you recognition for having solid fundamentals.

Now, interviewers look at your project and their inner monologue is probably:

“They probably just cobbled this together with AI in a couple of days. Nothing special.”

And then, even I start to doubt myself.

Under this hyperinflation of expectations, it feels like we must become decathlon-level superhumans just to qualify for a seat at the table.

When Cheap Signals Saturate the Market, What Are Certifications and Grades Really Worth?

So people start frantically grinding for certifications and test scores.

Yet truth be told, in an era where even grade-schoolers can prep for exams with AI, conventional credentials that rely on rote memorization and question banks have suffered catastrophic devaluation.

When every applicant shows up with a perfect certification score, you’re trapped in a dead end of cheap, saturated signals.

How, then, do you prove you’re not just an “AI typist” churning out prompts, but someone who genuinely drives 10x value?

A Truly Grounded Interview Assignment: The Prototype Is Table Stakes; The Post-Mortem Is What Counts

A while back, I came across an exceptionally clear-headed take-home interview assignment that felt like a slap in the face to anyone mindlessly evangelizing vibe coding.

The company stated upfront:

A working prototype is the bare minimum, but we don’t want a toy wrapped in an LLM shell.

What they actually cared about was:

  • A PRD (Product Requirements Document)
  • A TDD (Technical Design Document)
  • And three soul-searching questions:

What I personally built What I reused What broke and how I debugged it

Seeing this felt profoundly insightful.

This is the real flex for an engineer in the AI era.

AI can generate a slick quicksort or spit out impressive-looking boilerplate, but it possesses neither business intuition nor architectural taste.

When you build a multi-agent collaborative architecture and agents suddenly lock into a logic deadlock, or when you validate complex data and the model hallucinates wildly over edge-case distributions—another AI might offer suggestions, but the person who cleanly cleans up the mess and internalizes the lessons is still you, powered by your first-principles logic and auditable reasoning.

Irreplaceable Value: Cleaning Up When AI Drops the Ball

Rescuing systems when AI screws up, and architecting fail-safes and error-recovery mechanisms around it—that is your true, irreplaceable value.

After all, in the business world, an AI can’t go to jail, can’t be fired, and won’t wake up at 3 AM to shoulder the blame when production goes down.

A huge part of what companies pay for is your accountability—or integrity, the kind of foundational traits taught in Intro to Accounting.

Yet reality is often far more sobering than the ideal.

While a few enlightened teams are eager to examine your “post-mortem autopsy report,” most hiring managers and HR teams facing mountains of résumés still retreat into the laziest decision-making mode: falling back on conventional badges that have long succumbed to inflation.

Don’t Wait to Be Discovered—Stage an Ambush

If you passively wait for others to uncover your intrinsic value, chances are you’ll simply drown.

You have to stage an active ambush in interviews and opportunities alike.

Don’t wait for the interviewer to ask, “How are you different from AI?” And don’t just drop a slick, seemingly flawless demo video.

Slap your architecture and failure-mode analysis right on the table. Openly acknowledge what was generated by AI, and then boldly emphasize:

  • Where did the AI screw up?
  • How did you catch the mistake?
  • How did you apply fundamental engineering principles to steer it back on track?
  • How did you turn that failure into a permanent safeguard so the system never breaks that way again?

When it’s your turn to ask questions, challenge them directly:

“How does your team currently validate AI-generated architecture to ensure latent logical vulnerabilities don’t make it to production?”

Conclusion: When Everyone Chases Speed, Chaos Mastery Becomes the Rare Commodity

In an era where everyone is in a frantic race to prove how fast they can build, having the courage to show how you handle unknown errors and chaos—and seizing the narrative—is the single most scarce value you can carve out for yourself amid this hyperinflation of expectations.