I started playing around with Chat GPT a few weeks ago. I was blown away. Immediately, I had to build something using this tool. I realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to get into something at the exact right moment.
I toiled for a few weeks on what to create.
I wanted it to be something that everyone in the world could use. My past projects (not in AI) were niche use cases in small local areas, and I wanted to build something more significant than that. The biggest thing I learned from all my entrepreneur endeavors is to, going forward, build something with a massive potential market. Too often I built something cool that only relatively few people would ever need to use.
So I googled world trending topics on Google trends. Immediately, and quite luckily, I found the keyword “cover letter” to be extremely trendy at that moment. And it was an “aha” moment because I, too, had a pain point in cover letters.
Either I hated doing cover letters and labored through them for jobs I really wanted or simply skipped applying to the jobs that required cover letters that I wasn’t that interested in anyway.
And so, I decided to create an AI cover letter generator.
To make it different from any cover letter generator out there (which existed before AI), I realized I needed a key feature no one else had. And then it dawned it me that most cover letter generators simply ask for your skills. What if my cover letter generator asked for your skills and the skills required in the job description?
In the result, I set out to create a cover letter generator that asked you to paste your resume and job description into separate forms and mix them up into a cool cover letter. It would take the text of both your cover letter and the job description and write you a unique cover letter based on the skills and experience required in the job description relative to the skills and experience listed on your resume. Magic!
I’m a novice coder, but I was experienced (as much as possible at this point in time) at making neat prompts on ChatGPT so I knew I could do it.
So I fiddled with the Open AI playground, experimenting with my prompts over two days until I found what I thought was the best results for a cover letter made from my resume and a job description for a job I actually wanted that I found online. I would say I tried about 1000 different prompts, with many unique mixtures of max tokens, temperature and penalties.
Next, to create my application, I needed to learn how to code a website that did everything the Open AI playground did for me but in a much more user-friendly manner. Most importantly, I needed to have separate form boxes for the resume and job description, unlike the Open AI playground, which only has one form box.
And so, I watched a few YouTube videos on creating “ad copy” AI generators (which is analogous in a way to cover letter generators) and learned overnight to make my app on bubble.io. All I had to do as the final step was connect the Open AI API to my output form on my new website.
It took three days of work from start to finish to create my app. It is called Tally.Work (link). Check it out!
In the end, it turned out pretty well. Some people even seemed to think it was cool on HackerNews. Right now I am getting thousands of users on just the first day and I’ve actually spent about $100 on Open AI tokens (which is a problem for another day).
I realize that the cover letters generated on my app do look like an AI wrote them. But that’s ok. AI (at least my prompts) is not there yet. But one day, in the not too distant future it will be. Until then, my tool could be a place to start a first draft of a cover letter. Users could use my tool to get started and then edit and add to the cover letter to make it sound more human.
It also dawned on me that AI is going to all but remove from existence make-work and busybody tasks like this. That’s good, right? Right?
I do hope that this project winds down because, as I mentioned, I’m not too fond of cover letters, and if this project (or others like it) succeeds, then employers will stop asking for cover letters, and the app will become useless. As I mentioned, I hate cover letters.
What I do hope happens from this project is that I learn a lot from this experience so I can build a more interesting AI app that I will hope does not fail.
My advice if you are looking to build your own AI app is to just get started. Use the Open AI playground where no code is required and then build your frontend either with code if you know how or with no code on a no code builder like bubble.io. There are tons of YouTube videos on all this, so why not start today?
Jeff Dutton is a employment lawyer for employees and employers in the Toronto area. Learn more about him by checking out the personal blog.
Original. Reposted with permission.
