Set up a small open-source GitHub repo to showcase your skills, and ask people in your network to give it some stars for added credibility. If you’re not sure what to build, you could create a simple RAG bot using Claude and feed it your resume — that way, employers can literally chat with your “digital twin” and learn about your experience through an AI agent you built yourself. At least thats what I did lLet me know if you need the source code :)

You aren’t being serious are you? If a company wants to know you can operate at scale - putting source code out on GitHub that you did as a hobby project is just the oposite.

I'm having the same thoughts. It's okay to have a couple of small side projects on the resume (I do), but for showing off real skills you would need a complete product which basically means starting your own business, at least in terms of time and effort

Dont show some vibe coded hobby scripts. Show that you know how to build software AND how software engineering works. So build a small application that that shows you understood some basic architecture principles like oo, seperation of concerns etc. Then add a CI CD pipeline and Docker Images to show that you also have thought about deployments on production systems.

That still doesn’t show operating at scale - unless the business gains a lot of users.

It shows that you understand the fundamental concepts required for scaling in the first place

“Understanding” really doesn’t mean much without experience with actually working at scale.

So in theory I could hook it up to my LinkedIn account and it would go through people commenting on my posts, run sentiment analysis using a LLM, and identify key supporters or detractors?

Yes exactly if LinkedIn allows me to work with its API like this (its restrictive). This would work with YT, Instragram and X out the box. The key thing is this is AI with human oversight and it learns, gets smarter, the data overtime can turn into sales opp. The agent also adapts based on beacon profiles and optimises when to send comments so it doesnt feel robotic and maximises engagement rate.

I'm a former LI employee so I know some people there in product that may give me a chance but you got it one.

scraping via a browser plugin is not an option? would make you independent from any 3rd party api and the browser already has the users credentials

how would it learn? train/fine tune a custom llm?

That is definitely an option, perhaps not for mvp. Estimated time to learn vary's all depends on the amount of volume coming, the mix of platforms and category, but precedents exist. I estimated about a month from stress testing. Based on this exchange (thank you btw) i might just get this out and see how it goes.