Show HN: Cover letter generator with Ollama/local LLMs (Open source)

14 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by stanyy
(coverlettermaker.co)

20 Comments

BugsJustFindMe

12 hours ago

Now you too can send your fully automated AI resume and cover letter to the fully automated AI rejection system the company needed to set up because everyone is flooding them with thousands of automated AI resumes and cover letters that have no friction to generate.

tempest_

12 hours ago

For real I basically don't even read cover letters any more and I don't blame the applicants for generating them with LLMs. Unless you are applying for a higher level position a cover letter used to just be a mild heuristic for this person took an extra 10 minutes to alter their standard cover letter and include a different related paragraph. Now its just wasted text.

sam_lowry_

5 hours ago

Almost everywhere I applied, and these are dozens of positions over many years, I wrote a concise, sometimes funny, sometimes provocative, sometimes insightful cover letter. If I knew something about the company that HR would find interesting, I would write it. If I knew something about the industry or the founders, I'd mention that as well.

My personal experience is that cover letters do not help at all. At best, it's a test for myself. If I don't want to write a cover letter, I should not apply.

lylejantzi3rd

3 hours ago

Welcome to the age of ATS. Nobody reads cover letters or resumes anymore. They read the summaries that the AI inside the ATS generates.

6stringmerc

2 hours ago

This was already an article, so in recognition of your genius, go donate to some journalists.

tfirst

12 hours ago

If you are submitting an AI cover letter you should be aware that a significant portion of other applicants will be submitting nearly identical cover letters. If a human being is likely to read your cover letter I would write it yourself - even if you think the quality is lower. It looks unique to you, but not to the person reading 30 AI cover letters in a row.

stanyy

11 hours ago

I understand what you mean, but these letters are personalised based on what you have in your resume, your unique experience and skills. I would argue that it would be unlikely to end up with the same letter as someone else.

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

minebreaker

11 hours ago

When our team decides to hire a new programmer, each team member always writes a short letter, which tells the applicant why we want to hire them. How well they did in the interview, why they'd be a good fit for our team, etc, etc. I'm not naive enough to believe this is a genuine attempt but a some human engineering of persuasion, but I liked this tradition. At least it has some heart warming vibe.

Until I noticed that my coworkers were using LLMs to write these letters.

I lost hope in humanity.

Eisenstein

11 hours ago

This is actually a good thing. Hear me out...

Before LLMs, people had to write these things, and some of them didn't want to. They half-assed it and didn't mean what they wrote, but it was homework and they did it. Reading the letters, it would be tough to separate the sincere from the genuine, because it was done in everyone's typical style.

Now, you see the hallmarks of LLM text construction -- the effusive yet somehow stilted formality with an uncanny valley friendly tone that makes one feel at the same time like they are being sold something and that they are being used as a emotional dumping ground for an person with no self-esteem who needs constant validation.

When you see this, you will know who cares about the process and who does not. You can use that information however you like, but despairing for humanity is probably a bit overblown, IMO.

OptionOfT

11 hours ago

> some of them didn't want to

There are many things in life that I don't want to do, but that doesn't mean they aren't important.

I rather get nothing than something LLM generated.

saagarjha

12 hours ago

I suspect that by using AI to write a cover letter that companies explicitly do not want you using AI for, to the extent that they’re trying to check for AI use, will help you “stand out”-but not in the way you probably want.

6stringmerc

2 hours ago

I'm so glad to read about this!

Why?

Because it adds significant validation to my premise that AI is simply "automation improved" at this juncture and a crutch more than a viable tool in 90% of use cases.

In short, seeing "I made this because I was tired of wasting time with writing letters while applying for jobs" has me dying with laughter because the translation I come up with is "I am so crippled by laziness I'm recalcitrant to do the work to actually get the position to do work" and that's my take-away.

Of course there will be arguments to my perspective and I welcome them. I would like to feature them in my writings on this subject. AI is a shortcut for lazy, otherwise talentless people. I say this as neither.

hnkmrininhgbvg

12 hours ago

The whole repo is AI slop, get bent.

ta9000

11 hours ago

Please point out something you have built and open sourced that’s better. We’ll wait.

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]