Build looked absurd under a recruiter deadline

Building a resume platform before replying to a recruiter sounded absurd. The rational move is an off-the-shelf resume builder. Implementation cost usually outweighs the benefit, especially when a reply is due in a few days. A Riot Games recruiter reached out while I was still preparing to return to the job market. Suddenly I needed a current resume to send back, and I had roughly two afternoons to produce one. My default assumption was simple: buy beats build . Use an existing tool. Ship a document. Move on. AI changed that calculation enough that I built a reusable career system instead. The buy path looked obvious Under a short deadline, custom software is usually the wrong trade. You are not optimizing for reuse. You are optimizing for a PDF in someone's inbox. A resume builder gives you templates, export, and enough polish to look professional without inventing infrastructure. That was the economically rational stop line for most of my career. Build when the system will run for years. Buy (or manually assemble) when the artifact is disposable. I expected the same pattern here. What I built instead I built a private facts → prose resume repository with Cursor. The idea is to separate career evidence from application wording: Layer Holds Does not hold Structured facts Stable claims (actions, outcomes, metrics, scope) Resume bullet phrasing Application config Which facts to include, tone, theme New career claims Generated output Markdown and PDF resumes Source of truth Career claims live once in structured YAML. Each application selects, reorders, and rephrases them. npm run generate renders recruiter-facing prose. npm run pdf prints it. npm run check:ats runs structural ATS checks on the output. You do not need my private repo to apply the pattern. The useful split is structured facts on one side and disposable rendered artifacts on the other. Before generating a resume, the workflow researched the company and role, then used that context to decide which evidence