Planning an AI-assisted job search in 2026
This is an ongoing project
This post was written mid-way through the first week of my search. I plan to write multiple posts on this topic, culminating in a comprehensive "wrap-up" post once I land a job.
I'd like to share how I'm using AI to help find a new job in the nascent world of agents and automation.
Last Friday, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly unemployed. With as long as I've been in the tech industry (and working for startups in particular), I've come to realize that, well, these things happen, and the best thing to do in response is to treat it as an opportunity - both as a person and as an engineer.
A lot has changed since the last time I did this. I had not updated my resume in over seven years, preferring to rely directly on my professional network instead, if that gives you some idea of where I started. That network is still in place and I've put out feelers, but in the meantime I decided to take a structured and automated approach to this.
My personal agent
Introducing Henry
My personal agent is Henry. Henry runs on Hermes on a dedicated Mac Mini. For inference, I'm using the latest version of DeepSeek V4 Flash (medium reasoning) via OpenRouter for inference. I've used other models in the past, but I've found that V4 Flash is plenty capable for everything I've thrown at it, cheap, and fast.
Henry has an interesting backstory - he's an experiment.