The Night a Recruiter's Question Made Me Realize I Had It All Wrong

I was applying for jobs. Sending CVs left and right, hoping someone would give me a chance. Then one day, a recruiter actually replied. I thought it was my moment. Then came the question. "Did You Actually Write This Code?" They had looked at my GitHub. Clean projects, working features. I was proud of them. But they asked directly — "Some of this looks very polished. Did you write it yourself?" I told the truth. I had followed YouTube tutorials and used AI coding tools to help. The conversation ended shortly after. That Night It wasn't just the rejection. It was the question that kept replaying. "Did I actually write that code? The honest answer was complicated. I knew the basics — variables, functions, loops. But applying them on my own, without a tutorial guiding me or AI filling the gaps? I couldn't. I looked at my own GitHub and thought: if someone asked me to explain why I wrote this, what would I say? Silence. It wasn't that I knew nothing. I knew things — I just didn't know how