Post by Sai Charan L

A 28-year-old Cognizant dev in Hyderabad messaged me Sunday: "I've been doing LeetCode for 5 months. 412 problems solved. I have an interview at a product company on Thursday. They cancelled it because their AI screen flagged my resume for 'no shipped AI work.' I want to break my laptop." The one AI skill worth 5 months of LeetCode. Build this in 4 weekends: Weekend 1: Pick a workflow you do at work that's repetitive. Could be log parsing, ticket categorization, customer email summarization. Build a Python script that does the boring part using a Claude or GPT API call. Weekend 2: Add eval. Take 30 inputs you've actually seen. Tag the expected output. Write a script that runs your tool against the 30 + reports accuracy. Weekend 3: Make it production-shaped. Add error handling. Add a 1-line config file. Containerize it. Push to GitHub with a real README explaining what problem it solves. Weekend 4: Write a short post (LinkedIn or Medium) describing the problem, the build, and the accuracy number. Tag the tools you used. Now your resume has one line: "Built and deployed [tool] that reduced [workflow] from [X min] to [Y min] with [Z%] accuracy. Code: [GitHub link]." That line beats 412 LeetCode problems at product-company screening today. #AIUpskilling #IndianIT #MidCareerEngineer Skip this if you're targeting FAANG SDE interviews specifically. They still want algorithms. For everyone else applying to AI-product-co roles in 2026, this beats LeetCode. Comment your current role and one repetitive workflow you do. I'll reply with the 1-paragraph build spec to start this weekend. First 80 replies. Mid-career IT folks: be honest, which has more impact on your next interview - 412 LeetCode problems or one shipped AI tool with evals?