An AI resume product built to stay hands-on with public delivery

Architecture work pulls you away from the keyboard. ResumeVera is the counterweight: an AI resume builder, ATS checker and LinkedIn optimiser that I built and shipped alone, and where every decision has a consequence I have to live with rather than review.

Stay genuinely hands-on with the things architecture work moves you away from: public product delivery, automation, and designing an interface around a model whose output you cannot fully predict. That last one is not a thing you learn from reviewing someone else’s design document.

• Evenings and weekends only, which rules out any architecture that needs constant attention.
• Operating cost near zero at low traffic, including the model calls, which are the part that scales with use rather than with time.
• No component I cannot debug alone at 11pm.

Deliberately boring underneath: a managed Postgres, a single API service, a Next.js front end, and scale-to-zero hosting. Every place I was tempted to use something more interesting, I asked whether I would still enjoy operating it in six months.

The AI part is where the interest goes instead. A resume check is a judgement, not a lookup, and the product has to be useful when the model is confidently wrong. So the output is always presented as something to act on rather than a verdict, and the deterministic parts, parsing, scoring against a job description, formatting, stay deterministic.

In production, cheap to run, and doing all three jobs it set out to do. More usefully, it keeps me honest about the cost of the recommendations I make to teams building at a hundred times the scale.

I built the API before I had spoken to enough users about what the product should do, which is the classic mistake and I made it anyway.