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Posted by u/jhgaylor 4 months ago
Show HN: My AI Native Resumeai.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.

pmarreck · 4 months ago
I love this idea.

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

narrator · 4 months ago
This reminds me of the semantic web. It ultimately didn't work because people decided the most useful thing to do with it was lie about and spam with their metadata in order to better SEO rank. Right now we're in the idealistic phase, but soon the MCP servers will just be full of AI job catfishers from North Korea or Burmese dating scam farms with completely made up AI people. The curators will spend their entire existence fighting spam wars all over again with AI on both sides.
diggan · 4 months ago
> The curators will spend their entire existence fighting spam wars all over again with AI on both sides.

But imagine how much value shareholders of these AI companies could make by having AI chatbots spamming other AI chatbots!

majormajor · 4 months ago
So your desire is to have to talk to people less as a way to meet people? Seems like a good way to have absolutely no useful social skills left for when things reach the offline world.

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.)

pmarreck · 4 months ago
> have to talk to people less

These are not mutually-exclusive. You can talk to the same amount of people using your very limited time AND ALSO utilize a tool like this to expand upon possible connections.

Plus, there are a lot of things people want that are not socially acceptable to discuss publicly for privacy reasons. AI could potentially be a non-judgmental, privacy-preserving matchmaker here.

> You’re gonna lose all the

As previously stated, it’s not mutually exclusive. Existing online dating did not completely replace “meeting people randomly”.

> everything is amazing and

You can just stop there. lol

> (anecdote about things looking rationally perfect on paper)

Yes. this is true, there is an element of people that cannot be captured by rational mechanisms (I believe this too). But also imagine being able to filter down to just those possible people. Ruling out all the rational things that are dealbreakers for you. Imagine a matchmaker AI that is so smart that it can “intuit” what might work for you that you don’t even realize, based on data (personal example, if you are ADHD, you are automatically attracted to non-ADHD people as partners, but this also has the danger of creating resentment… Or if you claim to like functional languages, the AI might figure out that what you really like is solving problems as efficiently as possible, so it might give you a job recommendation that you might otherwise overlook because you’d end up making a deep and satisfying impact there)

rpozarickij · 4 months ago
> 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.

This reminded me of one Black Mirror episode [0] which is about something very similar for dating.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710978/

pmarreck · 4 months ago
I will have to watch that episode!
netsharc · 4 months ago
Hah, I like the idea of showing up to a blind date and opening with "So our LLMs told us we'd get along great, huh?".

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..

loudmax · 4 months ago
This is approximately the premise of the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ"
concats · 4 months ago
pmarreck · 4 months ago
So a system that creates artificial serendipitous encounters which are in fact "deeply planned", basically.
simianparrot · 4 months ago
There’s a Black Mirror about exactly this
runlaszlorun · 4 months ago
I had two Claude instances negotiate a fictional deal over startup equity. I wasn't expecting much but they knocked it out of the park, introducing new deal points along the way as part of a counter offer, etc. and successfully came to an agreement.
insane_dreamer · 4 months ago
It's interesting from a technological point of view.

But just because we _can_ do something doesn't mean we _should_ do something or that our lives will be better for it.

I'm not sure this is one of the things we should do.

GPerson · 4 months ago
This sounds terrible and I will spend my life opposing this.
pmarreck · 4 months ago
On what basis? Why the strong feelings? It's basically just an AI-enhanced LinkedIn/OKCupid with lead generation. Not sure why this is so horrifying to you.
cousin_it · 4 months ago
Yeah, this is pretty funny. Maybe the simplest version is an "AI secretary" that will have its own email address, and also will search the web for people to connect to (or other AI secretaries). Once something is promising, it'll forward stuff to my actual inbox. It seems like a thing that'd be really easy to demo, or maybe some startups are already doing this, I'm too lazy to look and definitely too lazy to build it.
dennisy · 4 months ago
I am not sure I get the full workflow or use case here, are there many people out there looking to make more connections (outside of dating)? I ask genuinely as I have been knocking this idea around too - but I am just not sure the use cases are as compelling as the technology.
GuinansEyebrows · 4 months ago
i don't understand why you would want this.
pmarreck · 4 months ago
Because as soon as you have a kid, your entire life is 1) work 2) family 3) sleep, 4) MAYBE some self-care, and there's not a lot of room at all left over for making friends, finding work opps that are better-suited for you (or higher-paying, or both), or finding sexual/romantic fulfillment if you're single or just completely checked-out of the relationship with your coparent (although it seems there's an unspoken but known thing that parents of toddlers are at the bottom of the well in terms of personal and relationship happiness level, and that it might improve with time?)
MarceColl · 4 months ago
> and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically

I thought the top post was already depressing, but this is a whole new level of psychopathic tech-bro mindset.

Interesting also how my other comment as well as the other top post were mysteriously artificially demoted to the bottom of the comment section even with a lot of upvotes. In both cases they were the top comment and instanly went to the lowest one. AI criticism is punished now?

pmarreck · 4 months ago
You seem like you not only have a chip on your shoulder about technological assistance in human lives (quite Luddite of you, even if we've all seen The Social Dilemma) but that you would prefer to believe a conspiracy theory without evidence (that "the AI is downvoting your AI-negative posts") than that you might simply be making badly-argued, negative-toned comments.

Tell you what- Here's a business idea you might appreciate: A series of islands where literally everything exists as it did in 1984, or 1992, or 2000, and you pay to basically "go back in time". All devices are confiscated on arrival but you are re-provided with the devices that were available in that era, meticulously maintained. We could call it "time/era tourism".

Heck, why stop there? Let's have one that is set in 1945, just after WW2 ended, or perhaps 1850/the Victorian era prior to the introduction of cars or the Industrial Revolution. Bonus points if it includes time-appropriate racism, sexism or diseases.

idiotsecant · 4 months ago
You will meet, in your lifetime, a very small fraction of 1% of the human race. There exists, out there, thousands of people that you would form a life long bonds with of the type that many people never find. If a machine can help you with that, why is that so bad? I know it's trendy to have this cynical 'tech bro bad lol' approach to literally any intersection of society and tech, but we've been 'tech-bro'ing social relationships as society changes in response to technology for centuries now.
whoomp12342 · 4 months ago
aeon flux

Dead Comment

vasco · 4 months ago
With each paragraph I thought more and more this was performance art. The voice of the text also sounds condescending in an LLM way, did you use AI to come up with those sections?
insin · 4 months ago
There are separate tools to get single properties from the same config object. If you got someone's LLM-in-a-for-loop to send 6 separate HTTP requests for those, I'd consider them to have participated in performance art.
superb_dev · 4 months ago
I was thinking similarly. So many redundant paragraphs…
rkagerer · 4 months ago
When I started reading this, I actually thought it was done in the vein of sarcasm.
fmbb · 4 months ago
I thought the point of the large language model version of AI was that they can understand human communication.

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.)

xpe · 4 months ago
MCP isn't a replacement for AI intelligence; it is a complement: a pragmatic way to make AI web actions more reliable, efficient, and scalable. Don't assume a zero-sum game between AI intelligence and integration work.

> We are bending over backwards to make the internet easier to interact with for AI than for humans.

I'm detecting an emotional reaction here, which I can understand and sympathize with, but I have a feeling it is distorting a full understanding of MCP's role.

Also, in terms of level of concern about AI; MCP in particular strikes me as probably much lower down the list. That said, one might view it as part of a general trend of people sacrificing our "humanity" (including privacy and control) for a little bit of convenience -- which I grant is concerning trend.

triyambakam · 4 months ago
It's giving the model a way to interact with the world. How do you expect a model to actually do more than be chat bot?
woodrowbarlow · 4 months ago
it's adapting the world (well, internet) to suit the model rather than the other way around -- to the point where there is a growing amount of content on the internet designed exclusively for machine consumption at the expense of direct human consumption.

it's like self-driving cars -- if we had a dedicated separate road network just for self-driving cars, and required that they all communicate with standard protocols, then we'd have self-driving cars by now -- but that's not actually the goal of FSD. the goal is to have cars that can use existing infrastructure and co-exist with human drivers.

ovidiu · 4 months ago
I'd expect it to do more using a virtual computer with a virtual keyboard and a virtual mouse, like humans do.
a99c43f2d565504 · 4 months ago
Chat bots require a special API I suppose, but an intelligent agent would just learn to use the existing way for programs communicating with other programs over a network. Unfortunately the I in LLM stands for intelligence.
jappgar · 4 months ago
Http?
xpe · 4 months ago
> MCP seems like we have given up on making the models good or smart.

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.

saretup · 4 months ago
Every new format or protocol gets used to display someone’s resume at least once (http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/).

Congrats on getting there for MCP resume before anyone else :)

jhgaylor · 4 months ago
I think if you write the first blog post about this you get to name the law.
thimwheet · 4 months ago
So... you couldn't explain what your skills are and then decided you will ask some "AI" to create a tool so that others could prompt it to have it answer what your skills are?

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?

kranke155 · 4 months ago
This is the way. This is the future.

“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”

xpe · 4 months ago
Let's step back. The changes relating to AI can be unsettling. But please stop taking it out on other people.
internetter · 4 months ago
What? They asked a reasonable question.
ctxc · 4 months ago
Snark, the snark :)
sho_hn · 4 months ago
Unlike llms.txt (which I think none of the major vendors have announced to be using/supporting, too, for that matter), there's currently no standard for AI assistants running a web search and discovering these end points yet, though, is there?

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).

jhgaylor · 4 months ago
Discovery for MCP is still an unsettled question. An adjacent protocol, A2A, has proposed using /.well-known for discovery. At the rate things are moving this won't be a problem for too much longer.

But yes, currently, you still need to read the docs to know if/where on my server you can find an MCP endpoint.

dennisy · 4 months ago
Adding a link for A2A (https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-...)

Also I believe there are some open source directories and Anthropic themselves are planning to launch or have launched a directory, so an NPM for MCPs.

pdabbadabba · 4 months ago
As someone who only casually follows this space, I'm not sure what to think. This is clever, but can someone explain whether this makes any practical sense? Is there any chance that a recruiter's AI will actually consume this service? Wouldn't it have to be manually configured to do so?

Maybe this anticipates a future where AIs discover and consume these services automatically?

Of course, even if this isn't practically useful, it's cool and maybe will help this person to stand out, at least insofar as it demonstrated that Jake is a clever person who knows how to use MCP.

jhgaylor · 4 months ago
I ended up building the first couple of iterations of this tool just to stop entering the same information into Claude for every new conversation.

By connecting an assistant to a job searching api, a database, and context about myself I am able to create a prompt such as "find interesting jobs for jake. maybe something in the ai space?" and in a few minutes I can browse a curated list of potential job matches.

By connecting the assistant to text to speech and speech to text tools and context about myself I can provide a the job description in my prompt and request the assistant play the role of an interviewer. This has been much nicer than practicing in the mirror.

I think that for the next few weeks/months that a hiring team connecting to my mcp server will play out well for me but I think you're in the right ball park. It will be because I was able to show that I can extract value from technology.