It was time to update my CV (resumé to North American readers) anyway, and I figured, why not just script the process? Over the many years of my professional life, my CV has existed as finely laid-out LocoScript, Microsoft Word, QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign and ultimately Apple Pages documents all used as to create printed and, more recently, PDF copies of my Curriculum Vitae for distribution.

But the world has changed — boy has it changed — and now CVs need to appeal to AI scanners, not people. Register journalist Dominic Connor put me onto the case, noting that the old rules of one to two sides of A4 at most, and all the content summarised as tightly as possible to make it easy for tired hiring managers to glean what they need, have gone the way of the dinosaurs in these LLM-mediated times. So out goes a stylish CV typeset in a tasteful multi-column layout arranged to appeal to humans, and in comes one that’s plain but way better suited to online PDF parsers and bots.