Why PathPilot?
The hiring landscape is brutally competitive. AI has made it easier to apply to jobs, but harder to stand out. Generic content blends into the noise. Companies filter aggressively. Candidates feel lost, burned out, and unseen.
PathPilot exists to fix that.
Not by automating the human out of the process, but by amplifying the human in it.
From Custom GPT Experiments to a Full Product
When I look back at the earliest days of PathPilot, it still amazes me how something that began as a late night experiment with custom GPTs turned into a full career platform with real users, real impact, and real complexity under the hood. I did not set out to build a full product. I just wanted to understand how far personalization could go, how deeply an AI system could mirror the tone, voice, and intent of an individual user.
Those experiments quickly became the seeds of something bigger.
Discovering the Power of Personalization
My early GPTs, like Merlin, were scrappy, improvised, and honestly a little chaotic. But they revealed something important. When an AI has the right context about a person, its output stops feeling generic and starts feeling genuinely helpful. It feels like support instead of automation, clarity instead of noise.
People kept telling me the same thing: “I wish Chat GPT always worked this way.” That stuck with me. It became the core insight behind PathPilot: the technology should adapt to the person, not the other way around.
Building the Personality Vault
To make personalization real, I needed to capture the elements of identity that shape how someone communicates. Tone. Voice. Strengths. Stories. Principles.
This became the Personality Vault – a structured way for people to teach the system who they are. Not through one questionnaire or a few sliders, but through evidence: writing samples, stories, brand statements, personality profiles, and lived experiences.
Once users started filling this in, something clicked. Their career materials, their outreach, even their interview prep began sounding like them. Not like an LLM approximation, but like their actual selves.
Turning Experiments into Software
But building a product is very different from building a clever prototype. Suddenly I needed authentication, navigation, workspaces, onboarding flows, security layers, and database schema that could support dozens of assistants. I had to design and redesign the UI. I had to write PRDs and break everything into batches. I had to think about performance, Supabase integration, error handling, and how to deliver a consistent experience.
And I had to do it all inside Lovable, a platform I was learning in real time.
Some days everything worked beautifully. Other days I was debugging initialization sequences for my assistants or figuring out why something wasn’t saving to Supabase. But that is the creative process. It moves forward, not in a line, but in loops.
The Breakthrough: A System, Not a Tool
The real turning point was realizing PathPilot wasn’t just a “career assistant” tool. It was a system. A place where all the elements of a job seeker’s experience could live together. Their story. Their materials. Their strategy. Their progress.
Workspaces brought order to the chaos. Assistants became modular specialists instead of generalists. The Personality Vault became the single source of truth. Suddenly, everything connected.
Where It’s Headed
There is still so much ahead, from deeper integrations with job platforms to evolving the assistants, to enabling agentic workflows that take care of the tedious steps between intention and outcome. But the core will stay the same.
PathPilot is built to help people express who they are, with confidence, clarity, and authenticity. This is the kind of work that I care about because it is the kind of work that actually changes lives.
And it all started with a few experiments that refused to stay small.