Comment by incomingpain

What do you fear?

> worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my hard work and claiming it as their own.

First of all, the cheaters will never read you, they'll just use AI.

Good news, your code is likely to never be read by anyone but you.

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." — Oscar Wilde

By being private, you're just not being talked about.

>I was thinking the alternative would be just linking my demo on my portfolio site as a proof of concept that yes I made it, yes it works, and if you're curious , here's a link to the code u can request independently of github.

I'll give you an even better path. Use AI to make something of size. Build in public. Who cares, if someone steals it, they are only stealing from AI and could have just gone to AI to begin with. If you get criticized, they arent criticizing you, they are criticizing some version of an AI model.