I wanted to reach out and ask what makes a good/successful software engineer, both in terms of your opinion and perhaps what you notice the industry tends to value. 

I feel that school has taught me some things about computer science, but really nothing at all about software engineering, and I really struggled to adapt during my internship. My manager's main feedback to me was that I was not at the expected level of technical proficiency and recommended that I work on some open-source projects to gain experience.

I tried that for a bit but I didn't feel like I could glean any insights on things like why the code was written in any particular way, and the maintainers seemed pretty stretched thin and weary about having to deal with first time contributors who may be using AI for the entire PR (which I was not doing). I'm not sure if this is part of a larger trend across open source or if I was just unlucky in picking my first project, but it's made me feel hesitant to try open source again for now, especially now as I wonder if I even have sufficient skills to be contributing to open source. 

My internship project revolved around getting the company's AI to automate my actual project of performing some API migrations. I think that I made the significant mistake of offloading certain tasks such as ramping up to the codebase and debugging build errors to the AI, which only gave me a weak foundation to reason about the changes I was making later on. I also felt that the presence of the tool itself gave the expectation to my manager and mentor that I would be much faster at making changes, and this coupled with my feeling overloaded with information surrounding the project and not recognizing it seemed to contribute greatly to me struggling. 

I'm not trying to shift blame here - I acknowledge that someone more skilled than me probably wouldn't have done as poorly, and I did not have those skills. I felt that I struggled to understand the internals of the microservice I was working on, and that the team was so busy that getting help often felt difficult. The main thing is, I can't tell if I was really just that bad at software engineering, or if maybe the expectations were artificially inflated by the presence of an AI tool that didn't actually work that well, and also the problems caused by me being overly dependent on it. Or maybe something else I didn't think about. 

But regardless, the only thing I can work on is improving my own skills, so I wanted to ask (alongside the original question of what do you think makes a good engineer) if you have any resources or recommendations for how I can learn fundamental software engineering skills/patterns and debugging skills as well. And also any other advice that you might have.