The Terminator will be Indefinitely Delayed
© 2025 by Mark McWiggins
I am working on a system to ease the job search burden by trying to build a system to upload an existing resume, parse out the information, and generate a beautiful LaTeX version.
I’ve been working on this for about 3 weeks now. I thought I could save time by enlisting the help of the super fabulous AIs that now abound in the marketplace.
So far I’ve tried 4: ChatGPT, MetaAI, Perplexity AI, and Google Gemini. I also have the Genius app on my phone, but it’s too much of a challenge to get computer code from the phone to the computer; if that works any better (and I would doubt it after seeing the rather pitiful performance of the other four), I will have to do it myself.
Here’s the spec I gave all four:
I am building a Job search automation tool. I need to be able to Upload a resume to an HTML form, have that populate a form based on the contents of the resume in these sections:
Top section (invariant between copies, saved in the user’s account):
User Name
User Email
User Address
User Phone
After that, a table
{Your needs My Qualifications]
that’s populated from the resume and has controls to allow users to modify, add or change lines.
After that is a section for past and current jobs, not quite invariant but won’t change half as often as the needs/quals part. So the controls won’t have to be quite as flashy or prominent, but shouldn’t be hidden either.
After that, a couple of sections that don’t change often at all:
The Education Section
Then
Projects showing my ability to do this job.strip
which could change with every job
Then
Recent Relevant Media
More like the jobs part as far as controls
Then Continuing Education
Also slow-changing like the jobs
And finallly
Also slow-changing Professional Societies
I tried to make this as clear as I could manage, as if I were talking with a bright but autistic person. But they all turned out to be not so bright, at least at parsing language even for a relatively small problem like this.
If you happen to be a high school teacher, give this problem to your class to see how they do with it.
I’m going to work on mine “by myself” although I will still use the AIs to untangle weird syntax problems. Wish me luck.
In the meantime, don’t expect General AI anytime soon.
