I'm building out a home lab and infrastructure project for a real small business as a portfolio piece while I break into security. The work is all mine. I'm racking the gear, configuring the network, standing up AD, making the architecture decisions. Everything gets documented in a GitHub repo with decision records and journal entries.
The way I use AI is as a sounding board. Talking through decisions, getting help structuring documentation, working through problems in real time. Think of it like having a study partner or a mentor available on demand. The hands-on work and the reasoning are mine.
I'm not having it fake lab notes or write documentation for work I didn't do. But AI is definitely part of my workflow, and I want to be honest about that rather than hide it.
The main question is, if you saw a portfolio repo and knew the person used AI to assist in writing documentation, would that change how you evaluated the technical work?