Resume Workbench is an AI-powered resume generation tool for people, like me, whose careers don't fit into traditional boxes. Built because I needed it!
The Problem
Traditional resume builders assume traditional, straightforward employment at typical companies. But some of the most interesting—and worthwhile—candidates have unusual work histories that span multiple industries and situations, such as intermittent gainful self-employment. For instance, what if you began your career as an independent filmmaker in Budapest, Hungary? Or spent years self-teaching programming and building blockchain projects? What if you've spent more time self-employed than in a traditional role?
These are hypothetical scenarios, of course.
Most resume tools force users into rigid templates: clear employment dates, siloed job titles, and cookie-cutter work experiences. These tools fail self-employed people across multiple industries. For interesting nontraditional candidates, these tools offer no assistance in telling the exciting story of their career, and as a result people will disqualify themselves for roles that they would otherwise excel in.
So, I built something that could tell that story.
Builder and Tailor
Resume Workbench has two modes: Build from Scratch and Tailor Mode. You are encouraged to try both on my live demo: Resume Workbench! The password to use AI features is "demo2025".
Build Mode throws the old, form-filling formula out the window in favor of pure biographical information. You throw everything in as text: no organization (or even punctuation) required! Work history, skills, random accomplishments, whatever.
The tool analyzes these, then asks clarifying questions to understand your experience. Then, it generates a pixel-perfect resume. No templates, no rigid forms. Just a casual back-and-forth that converts an otherwise confusing career history into a polished, ATS-friendly resume.
Tailor Mode takes the text from your existing resume and text copied from a job description, then adjusts and reorders your resume to emphasize experience and skills relevant to the provided job listing. The user controls the relative "intensity" of tailoring techniques, including job-related keyword emphasis and language matching. In addition to generating a high quality role-specific resume, this mode includes suggestions for interview preparation as well as a summary of the changes made to the user's original resume.
Both modes generate high quality, structured resumes. Users can choose among several stylish, non-distracting themes, and if they are happy with their results, they can download their resume in PDF format or raw HTML.
User Feedback
Resume Workbench works especially well for people with unusual career paths—lobstermen-turned-teachers, independent filmmakers, multi-industry freelancers and the like. Interestingly, Resume Workbench seems especially effective at revealing opportunity and ability to people who otherwise disqualify themselves from well-suited work.
One user noted: "I get stuck thinking I'm a certain type of person who can only do certain jobs. Resume Workbench showed/reminded me that 'oh right, I can do that too!'. It's reassuring to see that I do have relevant skills."
Another user described the builder mode with candor:
"This thing does a better job that I ever could at the dismal task of cramming my life into corporate speak. I gave it random information about my checkered work history and boy the thing did great, including making sense of semi-intentionally garbled inputs and typos. I'd most definitely recommend this to anyone building a resume!"
Wrapping Up
What began as an experiment—using Claude Code to build an AI-powered tool—became something useful. Even better, Resume Workbench has been a wellspring of confidence for friends as they've navigated the currently challenging job market. You can try Resume Workbench for yourself here!
Building this taught me a lot about LLM context engineering, which turned out to be the most interesting piece of the puzzle by far. I'm excited to keep exploring the recently-possible!
Tech: Python (Flask), HTML + CSS (Tailwind) + Javascript, Claude Code, Anthropic API
