This Bot Tricked Me Into A Video Response on Resumes...

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, we're going to the comments. This is from job with Lena Peabbot Alex. I think I got the username right. Um, this is in response to the one of the recent videos I made about using side projects and how um when I talk about using AI and side projects, I kind of try to remind people like what are the goals of creating side projects for you, right? my goals might look different than yours, especially if you're trying to use side projects for getting a job or something like that versus just having fun versus learning versus whatever your goals are. Um, so they were saying, um, do you think AI could help automate customizing job applications to highlight those learning experiences? And this is with respect to, um, side projects and, um, you know, kind of getting stuck along the way and and how you can leverage that for learning.

So again, do you think AI could help automate customizing job applications to highlight those learning experiences? Short answer is yes. Uh the other short answer is like no, don't abuse that. End of video, right? Um but let's dive into that a little bit more. Um you know, this is probably going to sound obvious, but like AI is a tool. I think that you can use a tool. I don't think that the tool should replace everything. Um, and the more that I'm using AI for things, especially at this point, the more I feel like I cannot stress that enough. I'm literally running an agent swarm on my computer uh behind the camera and it's been like a week of me trying to iterate on this stuff and I am going crazy. Like I want to punch my computer screen because it's so frustrating. And um I think that when we just start like leaning on the tools to do more for us and uh they're not quite there, we can run into this stuff.

But the same thing applies if you're just going to like use AI to go like apply to jobs and put the content together for you. Think it can help, but I don't think it's a replacement. So I think that you can absolutely use it as a tool. So let's we walk through an example here. So say you were working on a side project where you wanted to learn about pick any technology you wanted to learn about using MongoDB and building a NodeJS site and using React right so there's a few technologies you wanted to learn about so you set off to go do a side project and you're like okay this guy on the internet said go build side projects to learn about things and then I can put that on my resume and like now I don't know what to do. So, at a minimum, what you could just do is like go talk to AI about it.

And one of my recommendations is like this is like a more practical kind of thing is I've been trying to use AI for a while to have conversations back and forth. And recently what I've done is see my microphone. I am not typing to AI anymore unless I have to give it code snippets. Um, I am using voice. It is so much better. Like it is I I can't even express taking my like I'm frustrated using AI and it's like you know a whole like level of uh reduced stress just being able to uh talk about the things instead. So, um, I would literally get a mic and you can you like if you have chat GPT, you can I'm pretty sure there's like a button on the screen built into it where you can talk to it and I would just summarize the things that you were learning about, right?

Like talk to it about that. So, you're kind of summarizing maybe in a more verbose way kind of like how I'm talking right now. I'm kind of just, you know, going over a bunch of what, you know, a bunch of different things and then use AI to be able to give you a summary back, right? It will call out, you can ask it to call out the things that you've been talking about and you could say like, give me a bulleted list of like key learning points from working on this project. Now, what I would not do is just like copy paste onto resume and then walk away or copy paste into job application and walk away. I would do this and like you might build up this bigger list of like you know these learning opportunities across a bunch of different projects and stuff. Great.

Now you're going to want to refine that. And this is for a couple reasons. One is that you'll probably end up with a list that's like maybe there's duplicated things, maybe there's not relevant things, maybe there's just too many things because you've done a bunch of different projects. But like that's a good spot to be in because you can always refine it and reduce it. So I would recommend getting that done and then going through and then refining it. And the second part to that is that if you are familiar with AI writing, it's pretty trash. Um, it's okay at some things, but like if you pay attention to how it's writing, it's and you see enough of it, it's very obvious that it's AI a lot of the time. So, um, I would highly recommend that you go through what it was trying to summarize and you go add your human touch to it.

Um, you may want to do multiple passes of this, right? You build up this big list of things that you were like had for learning opportunities. You go refine it in terms of reducing the amount of them. Then you could go say, "Cool, I'm going to do a pass of like listing these side projects with learning opportunities with these bullet points." Now, awesome. You could take that and say, "Hey, AI, like could you help me quantify the significance of of these different learning opportunities and see what it says?" Right? It might give you another list back and it's kind of tailored a different way. Cool. Again, don't necessarily copy and paste that blindly. You may want to go look at that and say, "Okay, did it try to phrase things in a way that sounds better? Sounds like it's demonstrating the significance of what I was doing more effectively." If it does, bring that over.

You know, swap it out for your list. But if it's not, like, then don't use it. The point is that it's like a tool. And I think that a lot of the time like I lean into that kind of stuff for more of like a a creativity kind of thing or if I'm feeling writer's block for example if you said like my resume is wildly out of date and if you said Nick go update your resume what I would probably do is this this very similar process that I just explained and if I didn't have AI it would be the same type of thing. I'm probably going to try to list as much as I can, go through it, and do multiple passes, and I'm going to start reducing it.

But in the beginning, I'm trying to build up as much content as I can because when I have a whole lot of it, I can say, "Okay, these few things, maybe I can like combine all of that into one line item that really demonstrates some impact, or I can use them as different examples or whatever. But I much prefer to have more content and try to reduce it. But with AI, I can do the same type of thing where I can get a big list of like, you know, impact statements, different things I've worked on, and then try to have it refine it or summarize or um or organize into themes. But like, let it do that kind of work, but look at what it's doing. Don't just copy it. So, you know, that's how I would approach this kind of stuff personally. So, I think that you absolutely can use AI for this stuff, but it's just like everything else with AI.

Like, don't just use it, not think about it, and then say AI did it for me. Just don't do that. I have I literally fell into this trap for a coding thing. I was telling a buddy of mine yesterday for roughly a 24-hour period, not straight and not sort of purely consistent, more just like on the side when it was finishing up stuff. This is an agent swarm running. When it was finishing, I would say great, like, let's go to the next part. Let's go to the next part. And I was having it do this loop of benchmarking and tracing, and then I would get it to do an analysis. And it I had to really get like work hard to make sure that it was actually running the stuff with real data because it was making stuff up. Real data do the analysis and then we would iterate on it.

So I'd say great like move on to the next it uh performance optimization. We'd review the results. I'd have to keep catching it because it was making stuff up. But it got to a pretty good point. Then I realized that from the beginning it was just talking about benchmarking a method that it made up. Nothing in the code was calling it except the benchmarks that it made. So I spent all of that time refining that process just to find out that it was optimizing something that doesn't even get called in the code. Not cool. So you that's my fault. Like entirely my fault because I didn't pay close enough attention and went down that rabbit hole. So you need to pay attention to what it's doing. You cannot just completely outsource the thinking. So I can't blame it in this case. That was my bad. So that's what I would recommend for your side projects um you know uh in terms of capturing that kind of um learning opportunity for résumés.

So don't blindly use it, but absolutely leverage it for summarizing and rephrasing and that kind of stuff. So hope that helps. Friendly reminder that if you want questions answered, leave them below in the comments. You can go to codeccommute.com and submit your questions that way as uh as well and you can be anonymous if you do it that way. And then a friendly reminder that I do have another YouTube channel. It's called devleader path to tech and you can submit resumes for review there if you're interested. And I will be adding in interview tip videos and that kind of stuff as well. So, thanks so much for being here. Hope that helps and I will see you next time. Take care.