Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know The market for AI engineers in 2026 is crowded at the entrance and thin at the bar. Thousands of people can write a prompt, wire up a model call and put "built an LLM application" on a CV. Very few can show that the thing they built actually works, on cases they did not cherry-pick, measured against a target they set in advance. That gap is where you get hired. The single most convincing proof of work is not a line on a CV and not a certificate. It is a shipped, public artefact: a small agent that does one real job, sitting in an open repository, accompanied by an eval harness that proves the agent does that job well. Commits, pull requests and a documented eval are public and unfakeable. They demonstrate the whole loop a hirer is buying — that you can scope a…
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