Every great tool starts as someone’s personal annoyance. ProBot is no exception, so let me tell you how it began.
The problem: I kept missing recruiters
It always played out the same way. A recruiter would reach out with a genuine query or a screening message to get basic details, and by the time I actually saw it, the moment had passed. Sometimes it was the time difference, they messaged during their morning, I read it during my midnight. Sometimes I was heads-down on a project for days. And sometimes the message simply drowned in a cluttered inbox, three pages deep, never to be seen again.
The opportunities were real. My availability wasn’t. There had to be a better way than hoping I’d refresh my inbox at exactly the right time.
So I built VAi
That frustration led me to build VAi my personal AI assistant that lives right on my portfolio. VAi answers any question a recruiter might ask about me, in my voice, grounded in my real professional data: my resume, my LinkedIn profile, and my portfolio site. You ask, VAi answers on my behalf, 24/7, no matter the timezone or how buried my inbox is.
VAi went viral
I didn’t expect what happened next. The story of VAi took off. People loved it. My peers loved it. Recruiters especially loved it. Chatting with a candidate’s bot turned out to be far more delightful than skimming yet another PDF resume.
It even got featured on CNBC.
And then the messages started coming in. Not just from developers, from designers, marketers, students, career-switchers, people from every field. All asking the same thing:
“This is amazing. How do I get a bot like VAi for myself?”
Most of them couldn’t build one from scratch. But all of them wanted one. That was the spark. I realized the real problem wasn’t my missed recruiter replies anymore, it was that everyone deserved their own VAi, without needing to write a single line of code.
So I set out to solve it. And ProBot was born.
See it in action
Here’s a quick walkthrough of building your own bot on ProBot, start to finish:
What ProBot actually is
ProBot turns anyone’s resume into an AI representative, the same idea as VAi, but as a product you can set up in minutes. Paste your career data, pick a personality, bring your own LLM key, and share a public link or drop a one-line widget onto your own site. Recruiters chat with the real you, on your terms.
A few decisions shaped what ProBot became:Building for the community made it open source and free: VAi was a gift to recruiters, ProBot is a gift to everyone job-hunting. There’s no paywall and no usage meter. You bring your own model key, so you only ever pay your provider directly (often pennies, or nothing on free tiers). The entire project is MIT-licensed and open on GitHub for anyone to read, fork, and audit.
Building for non-developers made ProBot a hosting platform: The people asking for a VAi of their own didn’t want to manage servers so ProBot hosts your bot for you. Sign up, build, share. Nothing to deploy.
And for the security-conscious, you can self-host the bot: If you’d rather
not trust any operator with your setup, run the tiny probot-bot runtime on
your own domain while the platform handles the heavy lifting, your LLM key
never leaves your infrastructure.
What’s coming next
This is just the origin story. In the posts ahead, I’ll pull back the curtain on how I actually built ProBot the architecture, the design decisions and trade-offs, the spec-driven development workflow that kept it on the rails, and a tour through ProBot’s full lifecycle from idea to launch.
If that sounds like your kind of deep dive, stick around.
Ready to build your own representative? Get started free or follow along on GitHub.