How to approach my role and possible future career?

Hello there,

would like to hear your opinion on my current working situation.

So, to explain my situation on where I stand right now. I am 3rd year bachelor student and have ongoing internship in automotive OEM company. My position is in Digitization / Lean manufacturing department and I am working there for almost two years now.

At start, my work was typical office support gig for uni students but over the time I worked my way to the position where I am now and I kind of became the lead "software developer". I honestly still can't really believe how fast it all transformed to this.

I started with basic automation with MS Power platform and VBA (I study IT management) but since my ideas mostly got positive feedback I started to get more and more complex tasks in terms of digitization. Like: stock visualization, visitor system management or most recent computer vision tasks.

Since I am still intern, I mostly make no objections (only if task make no sense) and try to deliver the best I can. What I see as problem is the way I do it. As I said, my background is not in programming so I mostly use help of AI or generally google things out. Over the time, things got better since I learned the basic concept of programming (Python) and overall got better at finding information online. Also, I found quite useful recycling old things that worked for me from older projects.

I took my whole programming journey as just nice addition to my work since my whole job is just to make it easier for others in manufacturing process. BUT, recently my manager reached up to me with some updates on my work and that management is happy with what I do - which is nice ngl but I was also informed that since I am able to perform tasks on my own (at least for now) they will be stopping the process of hiring real software engineer which should originally take the programming part from me. I kind of counted with it and never imagined that I would become SW developer like that.

Overall, it makes me quite nervous about the future since every project I did always started with googling: How to do task X in a way Y - which I would say is not appropriate but I must admit that I really enjoy the problem solving part of building something new even if it takes lot of time.

So, how would you go further in situation like this? Also, could you please share your thoughts on how would you see me as potential employee (I am honestly not even sure to which position I could possibly get my self into with background like this)?

Thanks for any thought on this.