03 Sep 2026 • Calgary, AB
a friend recently asked me "Do you think it is a bad thing people use LLMs for resumes and such? "
Here is a collection of thoughts about it.
- If there is a certain subset of people who would immediately dismiss a piece of writing if they feel like it's AI generated, then it's in your best interest, as someone who wants people not to dismiss your thing, to avoid people flagging it as AI generated.
- A resume should be a highly compressed document that is intended to be a first impression of you and your work, you have unlimited time to attempt to get that first impression right before you send off a resume.
- I believe time attention and taste invested into something should be proportional to how important it is, and resumes are important.
These points are more related to ai use and writing in general
- there's something insulting about reading what I'd call "straight prompt expansion" type content presented anywhere. In that if you put in "take these bullet points and expand them into a paragraph" to ai and then send it to someone, the result is both a) less accurate to your intent than just sending over the less polished bullet points and letting the reader interpret them and b) a direct waste of someone's time because they have to read more words and compress the ideas back into the actual content of the message themselves. When multiplied out to a higher leverage format, say a resume, a social media post, I think it becomes even more important because your intent is for orders of magnitude more people to read it.
Also consider that in competitive spaces, like the formats above, 1% better can double or 10x the result, because attention, money, the best jobs, and nearly everything else important in life are power-law distributed.
- the "false advertising" angle. When a burger restaurant uses ai to generate a picture of a burger and advertises using that ai gen picture of a burger, they are misrepresenting the item they are selling. I think a similar idea can be applied to writing as well.
- Intent. When I create something, and share it, It's important to me that my intent, and style are preserved. It feels weird when I sign off on something phrased in a way I wouldn't.