Show HN: My AI Native Resume
166 jhgaylor 94 5/5/2025, 1:44:09 AM ai.jakegaylor.com ↗
I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants. Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions.
MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my professional background and a set of tools, prompts and resources to help explore my skills and experiences.
The code is open source, so you can create your own AI-driven resume server. Check it out here: https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server.
During my job search I paired my mcp server with others such as notion, hirebase, and gmail to build a leads database, write cover letters, and track my job search.
However, I will retire from this cursed industry if this will be the expectation in the future
I've once been at company that had 90%+ such colleagues.
Uff, if that is the future of this industry, I'll retire as well
They absolutely were not interested in learning anything. I left knowing more C++ than they did despite having started there with total C++ experience of a hello world tutorial, and the fact that I still don't count myself as a C++ dev today.
I would never utter the phrase "I know C++" because it can mean so many different things to so many different people, and I don't think anyone truly knows the whole language.
Not using templates nor smart pointers doesn't sound that bad to me(unless the entirety/majority of the codebase was written with them in mind), the duplication thing is more questionable.
The decline in the skills are clearly visible. And they’ve only vibe coded under a year.
Edit: there was an example in another answer, "I offer a contact tool when you use the hosted server because I can hide away my email credentials and expose a way for the LLM to send me an email."
Now we can spend our time more on the content and less on the presentation.
You can already use claude desktop, upload your resume, point it to your website, paste in some stuff from linkedin and output an llms.txt. You can get 80% of the way with just a couple of clicks.
Yeah, but this is the modern equivalent of the "Stavros at Gmail dot com", it's basically antispam by obscurity. Just wait for one spammer to send three seconds writing something that will parse emails from all your MCP commands and that's defeated.
But you know what? It's one step away from a system where AI's act as agents of our values, interests, needs and availabilities and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically.
Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.
My OpenAI ChatGPT knows me VERY well. It would possibly be amazing if a system existed that I could deem my chatgpt account a proxy of me for.
EDIT: I don't think there's currently a way to hand out a key to my (privacy-preserving except where explicitly allowed) own ChatGPT which also includes the conversation memory, unless MCP might provide this somehow
You're gonna lose all the best parts of life in an attempt to deal only with robots to avoid a few rough edges here and there. You don't know what you want as well as you think you do, serendipity is a necessity.
Well on our way to "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" times infinity.
(Much of this already exists, of course, and there are ANY number of "but our match percentages were so high!!" disaster dates out there that have left the human-blind-data-focused in sad confusion. The secret is that the accuracy of the match percentage was not the problem.)
A short story idea that's been in my head for years is a Google (or whichever all-knowing system) algorithm that gets 2 people to meet by showing them the correct ads to get them out of the house and to an e.g. concert. Fleshing it out: they get into conversation because they're e.g. both carrying books by a particular author because again they found this author through a Google ad. And 3 weeks later they ran into each other again at another event advertised to them..
MCP seems like we have given up on making the models good or smart. We are bending over backwards to make the internet easier to interact with for AI than for humans.
If general intelligence is on the horizon, this all seems a colossal waste of time. (Not your resume. I mean the general direction of AI development.)
First, whatever you mean by "we", we can do more than one thing at a time. Second, there are advantages to designing a protocol with formal semantics.
Congrats on getting there for MCP resume before anyone else :)
That means someone would have to jump through manual hoops to consume this.
Perhaps a needed bit of integration is a vendor that allows you to park a chat box on your website that knows how to call out into your MCP, so I can talk to your resume directly on your website. I assume this exists already, if not it'd be weird (it's not that hard to cobble together manually against the agent-ish APIs, after all).
But yes, currently, you still need to read the docs to know if/where on my server you can find an MCP endpoint.
https://ai.jakegaylor.com/llms.txt
Maybe I am misreading this, but does this mean sending a deepfaked version of yourself replying with an LLM-generated response? If I were the hiring manager and found out about this, you would not be invited to an interview.
Now we can spend our time more on the content and less on the presentation.
Another benefit of using MCP is the LLM can request subsets of the context as it deems them valuable instead of preloading all of the context head of time. I also offer a contact tool when you use the hosted server because I can hide away my email credentials and expose a way for the LLM to send me an email.
Yes, the visual density is higher on a carefully constructed PDF (measured by characters per square centimeter for example)
What do you plan to do if someone does give you a job and assign you a task? Tell your employer to prompt some tool to explain why you cannot complete that task?
“I’m feeling a bit under the weather, can you ask my personal AI agent why I probably won’t be coming in today? Thanks”
How much code to ai assisted code an individual does in a normal programming session?
what kind of difficult tasks are posed for the AI to know how much autocomplete vs self code an applicant does? Ask, what kind of test, lint and commit messages the user follows in programming?
How much does the applicant thinks about security and other features when programming or designing a system?
my thoughts..
It's not clear what benefit or use this is intended to provide (presumably they would have detailed its functionality if they intended to communicate this), but I assume it's ~super meaningful. I assume it's~ a scraping endpoint to add a url.
Edit: can't figure out how to use strikeout; please interpret the tildes as such.
It's a bit of a stretch but MCP is to LLM enabled applications what REST is to web applications.
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Separate from the meta, and discussing only face value, the `candidate-info://website-text` has a bit of marketing puffery like we don't usually see on resumes. I'm wondering whether that's intended to influence the AI tool behavior.
As a simpler solution for many tech workers to get their info out there and easily AI-accessible, what about a plain static XML file Semantic Web-like markup of the pertinent resume information, in terms of some standard ontology. Which information you declare to be true. And then "AI" and other tools works from that? It could be under a `/.well-known/` URL, and anywhere else you can put or interchange an XML file.
I started working on this mcp server that updates your resume based off what you have been doing in your editor/git-commits -> https://www.npmjs.com/package/@jsonresume/jsonresume-mcp?act...
e.g. if you were coding a supabase feature, it checks your resume for supabase and adds it if its missing.
Underneath this site is a package to make this easy to spin up for anyone. https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server
I was thinking about spinning up a site to let folks deploy their own candidate MCP servers, it just needs a configuration blob. I wonder if we can tie it in with resume.json gists some way.
I will have a play around, I might be able to import your package into the registry, and then anyone can serve it via http://registry.jsonresume.org/thomasdavis.mcp or something like that
As discovery mechanisms for mcp and a2a get sorted, I think that we will see a new class of tools for hiring teams to find and evaluate candidates.
Are applicants just supposed to sit and roll their thumbs waiting for the right AI to have the right hallucinations?
I don't get the excitement for applying this crap to each and every aspect of our lives. What about the human experience?
Resumes are already being run through a machine. We know what the next generation of machine looks like, so now as candidates we can put our best foot forward.
The really bright people are doing hype and bleeding edge things like this. Getting lots of notice, trending on HN (and probably LinkedIn), etc.
Everyone else? Yeah.
I don't mean this as a diss. This is just the meta. I got a really good job doing exactly this sort of thing. And it worked marvels for fundraising too.
I absolutely know not everyone has time or patience for this bullshit meta game. But networking and distribution are kind of like that.
tl;dr - If you trend on HN, LinkedIn, etc., you're already winning the hiring game.
What about the world?
Being good at this bullshit doesn't imply any kind of competence in anything that matters.
``` Walk through core technologies in your stack, explore my project work via the GitHub MCP server, and discuss design trade-offs:
Example: "Give me a code walk-through of Jake's use of AWS Lambda in his last project and ask him to explain the trade-offs." ```
I will make a better example text there, thanks. I'd much rather they explored my statbot repo anyway :)
Future tools I have in mind include taking a job description and returning a cover letter and sample interview.
Another benefit of using MCP is the LLM can request subsets of the context as it deems them valuable instead of preloading all of the context head of time.
It would be nice if the idea took off
Is there an already built AI tool that can take a regular resume and help someone easily generate and host their own version?
https://github.com/jhgaylor/example-candidate-mcp-server
You can run your own version pretty easily if you can spin up an express server. I haven't dialed in the readme yet but this package offers all the mcp functionality provided by my server https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server . You basically just need to provide a configuration object describing yourself https://github.com/jhgaylor/ai-jakegaylor-com/blob/main/src/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245665
Thanks for including the LLM rules (cursor) in the repo - MCP is new enough that I'll bet having that as a guidance was pretty helpful.
* A GitHub MCP exposing your code and issue contributions
* A site that exposes CV-data of candidates.
* An agent LLM iterating on all these, finding candidates that match roles.
Or vice versa, finding roles for a given candidate.
I might not be actively looking for roles, but I'd like to be aware of opportunities that might be a good fit. Recruiters historically have wasted my time.
Imagine the dystopia of having to convince a chatbot of one’s qualifications.
It is illegal to discuss the (il)legality of something without mentioning the jurisdiction.
You need to make it as easy as possible for me to learn about you. If instructions are necessary it’s not easy. If you want me to feed links to an LLM then just do it for me and share the LLM output.
I care about only two things - a LinkedIn exported resume and a portfolio page. That’s it.
I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo. I’m not spending half an hour clicking through a dozen repos and god knows how many files.
Ok, typical honest-and-probably-correct-but-snarky HN take. Fine I can deal with this.
> I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo.
Dude. I don't think OP is the problem anymore...
> Dude. I don't think OP is the problem anymore...
The most active GitHub profiles are students. Their repos are almost entirely class work which has an interesting factor of zero.
Almost all professionals don’t have meaningful or interesting GitHubs. Most people do work for their employer and have hobby projects that go no where. This is fine! These people get hired!
I do like portfolio pages where someone has finished something. I honestly don’t even care if it’s good. If you have a game on Steam that has only 3 review but it’s finished that’s spectacular. A near instant hire honestly. Just don’t expect me to actually download and run anything. Screenshots and videos please. YouTube is fine.
"Everyone should have his own HEAD, and now everyone can!" -Thomas M. Disch
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/head.html
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939027.Fun_with_Your_New...
https://archive.org/details/funwithyournewhe0000thom/page/16...
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