"Virtual Me" began with a simple case of restlessness in late 2023.
I'd been feeling less engaged in my work for a while. While pondering what my next role might be, as well as which industry would feel meaningful, I kept circling back to AI in multiple conversations with friends, as a genuinely new way to work.
For context, this is when ChatGPT first started gaining traction. This was right before the onslaught of AI showing up in just about everything. One idea kept resurfacing: instead of a generic chatbot (like ChatGPT), you could build a narrow AI expert on one specific thing, like a conductor or a plumber or a data engineer. Someone who's spent a career doing a very specific job.
That led to an obvious question: why not build one about my career, and hand it to recruiters as a second way to get to know me beyond a resume?
A good friend of mine had recently built something conceptually related: an AI expert on identifying birds, through a question and answer session about what the observer saw or heard. I adapted his approach as a starting point.
What surprised me most was how useful the process itself turned out to be. Organizing every project, every job, every story from my career into something a chatbot could draw upon was, unexpectedly, one of the better pieces of interview prep I've ever done. It turns out building a second version of yourself forces you to actually know your own story.
That first version has since been retired. (See the next post for what replaced it.) But putting my own career into words a machine could use taught me more about what I've actually done than any resume review ever has.
If you want the long version, prompt-engineering tips and all, the original 2023 post is still up on Medium.
