Anyone can now ask an AI to write a polished, backdated account of their career in an afternoon. A glowing summary of projects you led, skills you mastered, impact you drove: generated in minutes, nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, and almost impossible to verify after the fact.
That should worry anyone who relies on resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or portfolios to signal what they've actually done. Every one of them is a self-reported claim. They always have been. We just used to treat the effort of writing them as a weak proxy for truth. AI removed that proxy.
Most advice for standing out right now is about being more visible: post more, network more, build a personal brand. That isn't bad advice. It just solves discoverability, not credibility. It makes claims louder, not truer.
In a world where anyone can generate a convincing story about their past, louder claims just mean better-produced fiction competes with honest work on equal footing.
I've been designing, and am now building (for myself first) a different answer: a work journal that doesn't rely on you remembering to write anything down, and can't be quietly rewritten later.
The core idea is simple. Instead of a document you write once and polish forever, it's a log that captures itself passively from things you're already doing: commits, calendar events, the real trail of a working life. Periodically, weekly or monthly, you review what it captured, approve it, and it becomes part of a permanent, dated record.
The part that matters most: once an entry is approved, it's immutable. Not "hard to edit." Actually append-only, enforced at the core of how the tool works, with optional cryptographic timestamping so the record's integrity can be verified by anyone, even years later, even if I disappear as the person maintaining it. That's what turns it from another journal into something closer to proof of existence at a point in time.
A few design decisions I think matter:
I'm building a personal version first, pulling from my own GitHub and calendar into a monthly rollup, and I'm going to actually live with it for six months before deciding whether it's worth being more than that. No grand claims yet. I just think the underlying problem is real and getting worse, and I'd rather find out if this is a genuine answer to it than assume it is.
If this resonates, or if you think it's solving the wrong problem, I'd like to hear it.
*Related: [Resumes are becoming obsolete. Here's what I think replaces them.](https://dev.to/ayoolasolomon/resumes-are-becoming-obsolete-heres-what-i-think-replaces-them-3njd)*