Project overview
A live web app that tailors your résumé to any job posting and hands back a clean, one-page PDF.
Most people send the same résumé to every job, and the tools that promise to fix it tend to either stuff in keywords you never earned or grade you with a made-up "ATS score." I wanted a tool I would actually trust with my own applications, so I built BetterShell.
You build your profile once: every role, project and skill. Then paste a job posting (or just its link, and it pulls the details for you). BetterShell picks the experience that fits the role, rewrites your bullets in the posting's own language, and lays everything out on exactly one page. Every edit is highlighted with the reason behind it and waits for your approval before it sticks.
The core engineering rule is "models judge and write, code measures." One model decides which bullets earn their spot and which need work, a small, fast model rewrites only those, and plain deterministic code enforces the hard rules: exactly one full page, no orphaned last lines, and no invented facts. Each résumé is designed to cost pennies and come back in seconds.
I treated it like a real product launch, not a side project. Before going live in October 2026 I pressure-tested pricing by simulating a thousand job seekers' reactions to different offers, and landed on two free résumés followed by a one-time pass with no subscription. Behind the scenes, I built my own dashboard that turns GitHub issues into tasks for AI coding agents, runs each one in an isolated worktree, tests the result, and opens a pull request for me to review. Seven months and 1,600+ commits later, it's the biggest thing I've built.