I'm not sure where else to post this, so I apologize if this is the incorrect reddit for it.

For the past 8 years I have been a developer for a decent size apparel company where I help manage the order fulfillment stack. It's very involved with multiple integrations and vendors and blah blah blah.

My issue is that I became a dev at the company so my pay is less than my peers who got hired as a developers. I started as a Photoshop kid and automated myself enough that they moved me to a dev roll. I recently got promoted to Software Engineer 2 and am sitting at 78k a year now, which I am proud of. I kind of feel greedy wanting more, but my family could really use the additional income.

The biggest issue is that my son is medically complex and we just got kicked off of medical so all of my raise(5k) and some, is going to his yearly checkups until I meet my deductible. We thought we were going to get ahead, and then bam, the big man shot us back down. The promotion raise feels more of a cost of living wage increase, since I have had recent years without any raise.

I'm sitting here right now contemplating on how I have no real work to show, as all of my full stack repos I have created and or worked on are proprietary. Note that none of my work up until now has been AI absent. The past year I started asking direction from AI for some things, but never full on implementations.

My big question is that if I use agents to lay the scaffolding for a decent sized project, but do the majority of the coding thereafter, would that still show recruiters that I know what I am doing or would it even matter since AI made the initial commits to the repo?

For my day job I use GCP, AWS, python/web2app, typescript/react, and Ruby on Rails with PostgresQL and NoSQL. I have also been working on a video game late nights using Unity and C#, where I a plan on releasing my game at the end of this year. That code is also proprietary as my goal is to ship it and make some money off of it, although that may not be reality.

However, I want to branch out to a strongly typed language to show what I am capable of. What I want to do is create a headless backend api using ASP.NET and a frontend using NEXT/React to showcase my skills. The plan is to create a playground for game developers to theory craft their character stats and then to play out simulations to help balance their games. It will visualize growth/progression curves, battle simulations, and allow for custom function implementations.

If I use a coding agent to scaffold both projects(frontend and backend) and get the initial endpoints and architecture implemented, would this still look like a good project on a resume? I still need to be the one that sets up the cloud environments and properly handle keys and buckets and implement the core business logic. It also takes a good eye to ensure proper techniques are used such as SOLID principles and various architectural decisions.

There's just not enough time to do everything I need to do to get ahead financially in life. Thoughts?