Somewhere right now, an AI is writing a cover letter. Another AI is reading it, scoring it, and rejecting it. Neither of them will remember the exchange. The candidate spent eleven seconds; the company spent none. This is what we've decided hiring should look like.
I'm a software engineer. I've spent over a decade building things that run in production - the kind of systems where, when they break at 3 a.m., someone calls you, not your resume. I mention this not to flex, but because it's exactly the thing the current process can no longer see.
Here's what changed. AI made writing cheap. Overnight, every resume became polished, every cover letter became sincere, every applicant became perfect on paper. So companies armed themselves with AI to filter the flood - and now the machines talk to the machines, while the humans on both ends wait for an output. Keyword-matching pretending to be judgment. Six interview rounds pretending to be rigor. A rejection email six weeks after the final round pretending to be "moving fast". The process didn't get smarter; it got louder, and everyone stopped listening.
So I did the one thing every job posting kept demanding of me anyway: I built a personal project for GitHub. This site. But let's be honest about what it actually is. It's not a portfolio checkbox - it's one thinking person's scream into the machine void. Into this dead end of hiring that we built for ourselves - candidates, companies, recruiters, all of us, brick by brick, nobody at the wheel. I'm tired of pretending that smiling and bullshitting in Zoom matter more than understanding how things actually work. I'm tired of pretending not to notice the em dashes '—' - those long, elegant, statistically improbable em dashes - in every job description, while telling myself: relax, maybe the AI just helped them phrase the requirements, surely they still know who they're looking for and what the skills actually mean. Tired of the well-meaning advice to inflate my experience, to sprinkle keywords, to "optimize" my resume for a machine - as if the goal were to get hired by an ATS and go home.
And no - this isn't a rant against AI. You can't stop it, and honestly, you shouldn't want to: it's the most useful tool our craft has picked up in decades. I use it daily. Hell, this very site - its backend, its infrastructure, this exact text you're reading - was built with a $17 Claude subscription, three cans of energy drink, and a couple of free evenings. But here's the difference, and it's the only difference that matters now: do you understand - and personally answer for - every line of code and every word you ship? If yes, AI made you faster. If no, congratulations: you're not using the machine. You're a part of it.
But here's the part that actually matters, the part I'd say in any interview: the tool was never the point. AI can write the code - fine. The job was never typing. The job is understanding every line you ship and being personally answerable for it when it breaks. That hasn't changed. That will not change. An engineer who can't explain their own code didn't get faster; they got hollow. I read every line. I own every line. That's the whole profession, before and after AI.
And if you're a recruiter reading this - I know you didn't build this machine either. You're drowning in a thousand AI-generated applications per posting, graded on time-to-fill by the same system that grades me on keywords. We're on the same side of this, both feeding an ATS that reads neither of us. This Manifesto isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at the process we're both stuck inside.
Do I think writing this changes anything? No. But do I live with the hope that someday people will start actually seeing each other again - reading, asking, answering, like the interview is a conversation and not a pipeline stage?
Yeah. That one I'll keep.
P.S: If any of this made you nod - the reactions are right below. If it made you angry, they work for that too.