u/ExtensionBreath1262

Has anyone done this? If so, to what end?

I've kept all my projects on a local machine going back 3 years. Because I'm starting to look for employment, I pushed a bunch of my projects, around 20 repos, onto GitHub. No one has seen my code. Ever. So I uploaded the ZIPs of 11 repos into ChatGPT and asked for an "aptitude assessment."

I asked for an honest assessment of the developer's current progress: key areas of strength and weakness, as well as signs of progression or stagnation. Then I listed the age of each of the 11 repos in months.

I kind of need to know if ChatGPT is gaslighting me. The results of the assessment matched my self-assessment perfectly, without exception. As a self-directed learner, I have to rely on my ability to be honest with myself, and it's caused a lot of internal conflict when I'm not sure how to continue learning and growing. So it's weird for my current progression to come through so clearly in my work. It's word for word how I would describe my current state.

The assessment basically described the developer (me) as a strong intermediate engineer with unusually good systems thinking and architectural instincts, especially on the backend side, but with inconsistent engineering discipline and incomplete production maturity. It pointed out clear progression over time, strong independent learning ability, and a tendency toward premature abstraction and overengineering. The overall impression was something like: “high ceiling potential with obvious growth trajectory, but still uneven in refinement, operational rigor, and consistency.”

I went on to add context that, from the start, I focused on becoming a backend engineer. After I briefly described my philosophy for picking projects, ChatGPT pretty much said, "Yeah, that's a narrative throughline that plays throughout your work. Here are some concrete examples of how you stayed consistent with that ideology for multiple years."

So now I'm confused. Does anyone have experience doing this? Does "the work speaks for itself" actually apply here? Is the LLM sampling from the wrong population? Is the LLM projecting the general shape of the work onto an archetype? Like, my work is a triangle, not the Great Pyramid of Giza.

If anyone would like to go through my GitHub in good faith, I'll DM you. You can reply back here with your verdict on whether it reads as accurate or not.

I don't follow many SWE best practices, but I could. I just choose not to. Or is that a lie I'm telling myself? Crisis of identity over here, people.

Been programming for years and feel like I'm a pretty solid generalist. The timing seems right to hit the job hunt hard, but I'm still interested in doing the startup thing as a contributor. I have to many life commitments to go all in solo.

At this point I just want to build something meaningful in a collaborative way. Shoot around ideas, and tackle something more ambitious than I can alone. I'm about as far from an AI prompter as you will find, so I do have the option to lean into AI hard, and see how much it multiplies my output. But even if I do that it still all comes down to my taste and I'd rather be on a team or small group where everyone cares as much as I do.

How would you go about finding a project like this to join? I feel a little out of place like I missed my opportunity to participate in a startup and it's really gen-z's time. On the flip side who cares. I enjoy building and have love for the game.