The biggest one I keep seeing: treating meta titles and descriptions as an afterthought. Developers will spend weeks perfecting an app, then write a 10-word meta description that's just the site name repeated. The second thing — and this one really hurts small business sites — is no structured data. A local business with zero schema markup is invisible to rich results. It takes maybe 30 minutes to add basic Organization or LocalBusiness schema and the difference in click-through rate is measurable. For the Core Web Vitals point: LCP is usually the killer. Most devs don't realize their hero image is loading uncached from a CDN with no fetchpriority="high" hint. One attribute change, massive improvement.

One thing I'd add: the projects that stand out in portfolios aren't the most technically complex ones — they're the ones that solve a real problem. Hiring managers see hundreds of to-do apps and weather dashboards. But a tool that scratches your own itch (a script that automates your morning workflow, a dashboard for tracking something specific to your life) shows you can identify problems and build solutions. That's what engineering actually is.

The biggest unlock for me was building something I actually needed. Tutorials are comfortable because someone else already solved the problem — you're just following along. But the moment you hit a bug that isn't covered in the video, that's where the real learning starts. Even a simple CRUD app built from scratch teaches you more about debugging and architecture than 10 hours of watching someone else code.

Agree with the "force multiplier" take. The thing I keep coming back to is that AI handles the predictable parts really well — scaffolding, boilerplate, pattern matching. But the messy parts (debugging a production issue at 2am with incomplete logs, deciding whether to refactor or rewrite, navigating ambiguous product requirements) still need a human brain. The bar for entry-level work is going up for sure, but the ceiling for experienced engineers isn't going anywhere.