recursion

I got a email from a recruiter at a major technology company that explained why they were interested in me:

Hello Luke,

I hope all is well! I am part of the leadership team here at [Company], focusing on hiring leaders for key areas such as Gen AI, Monetization, and Core Infra.

I’ve taken a close look at your background and some highlights include:

Staff Engineer with Deep Search Systems Experience and End-to-End Ownership

At GitHub, you’ve led development on critical parts of Code Search across the stack — from document ingest in Go and backend services in Rust, to React frontend components and system instrumentation. You’ve re-architected services out of the monolith for major cost savings and built experimental platforms using Kafka and Elasticsearch. That kind of full-stack ownership and large-scale system thinking aligns directly with the kinds of challenges [Company] faces in Search Infra, Integrity, and Ranking.

Proven Builder with Startup Hustle and Broad Platform Versatility

From co-founding YC-backed FanChatter and launching jumbotron-powered photo apps, to building data platforms at Premise and leading critical infrastructure at Swiftype, you’ve shown repeated impact across backend search, observability, and product engineering. One recommender put it simply: “If I had the luxury of building a dev team from scratch, Luke is one of the first people I’d call.” That blend of technical depth, startup initiative, and platform reliability is exactly what [Company] seeks in Staff-level engineers.

It took me a second to realize why this email seemed so weird. It was rephrasing things I wrote for my LinkedIn profile. On LinkedIn, I try to summarize my professional experience in a way that (hopefully) makes me seem like a strong engineer. This LLM rephrasing of my resume isn’t a hallucination – it all comes from things I wrote – but seeing it rewritten like this is weird, like a case of déjà vu.