Accidental Anonymity

Tom MacWright argues that AI-generated resumes, portfolios, and outreach emails strip away the human connection and personal character that hiring managers and collaborators rely on. Drawing on 12 years of reviewing job applications, he warns that polished, LLM-crafted submissions reveal nothing about a candidate's true abilities, determination, or personality, making it impossible to form a meaningful impression.

Accidental anonymity I went on a run this morning and got the idea to write this, but Nolen https://eieio.games/blog/legibility-of-effort/ and Robin https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/fourth-law/ and Robin again https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/ai-promotion/ have written other, maybe better versions of it. Still, I have some recent experience and feelings to get out there, so here goes: Like Robin, I have been getting a lot of incoming emails that follow an LLM-like formula of observation about me and how it could be relevant to some product + ask that i try the product . A lot of these seem LLM-generated. Also, I review job applications. I've been doing this for a long time, about 12 years. I've read a lot of applications. In the last few months, I've started to see applications that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with purely LLM-generated commit messages. Partly, like Robin and Nolen, my reaction is that this is sad and I don't like it. Most LLM-related stuff has made me feel bad about people, work, and the world, and this is no different. I'm no purist - I use the tools and cannot deny that they're useful and powerful. My other reaction is that I don't know anything about these people . They haven't put themselves out there. They haven't said anything true. My personal prejudice here is pretty long-standing. I've written and sung songs, and published my artwork and writing on the internet for fifteen years, and a lot of the reaction I get is about how other people couldn't because they don't know how or don't think theirs is good enough or whatever, but let me be blunt for a brief moment: putting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack bravery. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that's a determination and character problem, not a skill problem. The fear is being found out for being imperfect. The fear is also for being known in general: maybe you're a real butch tough guy but your art style is playful and tender and you don't want that side to come out. Maybe your taste is weird or undeveloped and you don't want anyone to know. But the person who puts nothing out for judgment just isn't known at all. Which brings me back to the current moment: the point of resumes and portfolios is not just to list credentials, it's to give some hint as to which kind of person will be sitting next to you, to be inspired by their arc or their human characteristics and capabilities . Are they determined? Did they start off building silly stuff in neopets and work their way up to programming, or create some project based on their personal interests? The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools. I can't see the inputs to their outputs, see what they typed, or the process of building. The email about why I'm the right person to try your side project says nothing about you. I don't know why you made it, who you are. I don't know your writing style. I don't have any way to connect to you as a person, and no reason to care. I wrote a while ago about how Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness https://macwright.com/2025/10/16/the-art-is-the-person . People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes? I commiserate with the fear of being found out, and the want of perfection. But if you want people to connect with you as a person, you can't hide behind a machine. Publish your typos and show your struggle getting going. Be a human.