Last year I was applying to a mix of senior engineer, staff engineer, and engineering manager roles. Different role families, different keywords, different framing. Same five bullets at the top, rewritten thirty different ways across thirty different Google Docs.
Every recruiter call ended with "can you send the latest version" and a small panic about which version that actually was.
I tried the obvious tools first.
What existing builders kept doing wrong
Zety and Resume.io charge you to download the PDF, then nudge you toward an AI that rewrites your bullets into the same generic prose every other applicant is also generating. You end up paying monthly for a CV that sounds like everyone else's CV.
Canva and Word templates look fine until you try to maintain three versions in parallel. Edit a bullet in one, forget to copy it to the others, send the stale one to the recruiter. Ask me how I know.
Google Docs with branching folders works for a single career chapter. By the third role family you're keeping a mental map of which doc has the rewritten "led a team of 8" line vs the "shipped X to Y users" line.
The actual problem wasn't writing. I can write bullets. The problem was maintenance, version sprawl, and an AI layer that kept trying to write FOR me instead of helping me polish what I'd already written.
So I built Dossier.
The two design rules
Everything else falls out of these:
1. Separate content from presentation. You enter your career data once. Templates render it. Switching from a single-column ATS-friendly layout to a two-column modern one is a click, not a rewrite.
2. Your data lives in your browser. No cloud account required to use the tool. Zustand state, persisted to IndexedDB. The optional Supabase sync is opt-in, not the default.
The third rule, which I think matters more than people give it credit for: AI assists, never authors. You can ask the AI to tighten a bullet, suggest stronger verbs, or flag wordy sections. It will not generate a CV from scratch. The output stays yours.
The stack
Standard Next.js App Router. Nothing exotic.
-
State: Zustand, with a custom persistence middleware that writes to IndexedDB via
idb. LocalStorage gets the small stuff (UI preferences), IDB gets the actual resume profiles. -
PDF rendering:
@react-pdf/renderer. Each template is just a React component. Adding a new template means writing JSX, not editing an opaque template engine. - UI: shadcn/ui on top of Tailwind. Boring, fast, easy to extend.
- AI: optional, on-demand calls to OpenAI or Anthropic, scoped to a single bullet or section. No background "always improving your CV" loop. You hit a button, you get a suggestion, you accept or reject it.
The interesting part of the build wasn't any single piece. It was deciding what NOT to add.
No cloud-first architecture. No subscription. No required login. No AI auto-rewrite. No analytics on what bullets users edit. The product becomes radically smaller when you keep saying no.
What it looks like in use
The flow that finally killed my five-Google-Docs problem:
- Create a profile per role family. "Senior Engineer", "Staff Engineer", "EM". Each profile is a separate set of content data.
- Edit bullets per profile, switching profiles from a dropdown.
- Pick a template. ATS-friendly for keyword-matching applicant tracking systems, two-column modern for hiring managers who'll actually read it.
- Export the PDF. Done.
When a recruiter asks for "the latest version," I open the right profile, pick the template they probably want, click export. Maybe 30 seconds.
The AI assist sits next to each bullet. You write a draft. You can ask it for a stronger version, a shorter version, or a version that emphasises a specific keyword from the job description you're applying to. The model returns suggestions. You pick one or you keep yours.
There's no "generate my whole CV" button. There won't be one.
The tradeoffs I made
Local-first has real costs and I want to be honest about them.
- No automatic cross-device sync unless you opt into the (free) Supabase account. Most users don't bother. They export their data to a JSON file if they need to move machines.
- No "saved in the cloud" reassurance. If you clear your browser storage, the data is gone. Export to JSON is one click but the user has to remember to do it.
- No analytics on individual edits. I can't tell you which bullets users delete most often, because I can't see them. Some product decisions get made on instinct instead of data.
These are the right tradeoffs for this product. People applying to jobs have a reasonable expectation that their employment history isn't sitting in a vendor's database forever. The product reflects that.
Where it is
About 200 active users. Eight templates. Growing without ads.
If you're applying to multiple roles and tired of maintaining parallel CVs, or you've bounced off a builder that kept trying to write for you, give it a look: https://your-dossier.xyz
It's free. No account required to start. Data stays on your machine.
Top comments (0)