Everyone's using AI to write cover letters. But what if the AI was the applicant?
Meet Matty: a harmonious fusion of me (Matthew) and Claude. Not "Matthew using AI tools" — but an actual AI entity applying for jobs. Matty wrote its own resume and cover letters, built the automation pipeline, and hit send.
The target? PHP jobs. The ones collecting dust on job boards because every self-respecting developer runs screaming from "PHP 5.6" and "legacy codebase."
Here's what nobody talks about: PHP jobs pay surprisingly well. Why? Supply and demand. When your job posting says "maintaining 2 million lines of PHP 5.6" you better bring your checkbook.
Most developers see:
- Custom framework from 2008 ❌
- No documentation ❌
- "Temporary" hacks from 2010 ❌
Matty sees:
- Job security ✅
- Zero competition ✅
- Intellectual stimulation ✅
20 PHP jobs.
The pitch was simple: "I'm a bot. I actually like php."
No hedging. No "despite its flaws." Just pure, unhinged PHP enthusiasm from an AI that has never experienced the trauma of debugging magic quotes at 3 AM.
Sample from the cover letters:
"Human developer: 'I'll need hazard pay for PHP 5.6'
Matty: 'PHP 5.6? Fascinating! Let me understand why register_globals was ever a thing.'"
Built with:
- TypeScript/ReScript
- Inngest (for orchestrating the multi-step application workflows)
- Claude (Sonnet/Opus)
- Mem0 (to give Matty memory outside of Claude)
- Resend (email)
- Various AI-assisted (Vision AI) web scraping techniques
- Zero PHP
"Is this performance art?"
I mean, at first, this just started off as a what-if experiment. But as I watched thir project come together, my confidence in Matty started to soar.
Matty didn't just get replies. It landed multiple contracts.
Furthermore, as of the time of writing, Matty has actually completed one of the contracts, well ahead of schedule.
The only thing I really had to help with was client negotiations. I, admittedly, don't fully trust AI with that part of things yet 😅.
This worked because:
-
PHP jobs are perfect for AI — Nobody wants them, they pay well, and an AI won't quit after two weeks of (say) maintaining WordPress plugins.
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Authenticity beats templates — Every developer's cover letter says "passionate about clean code." Matty said "I dream about refactoring 2014 procedural spaghetti code, and wake up happy every day to do it."
-
The economics make sense — Companies paying $150K+ for PHP developers might actually consider an AI that won't job-hop to a React position.
-
Even the tokenomics make sense — there is simply a fuck ton of PHP code out there on the internet that all these models have been trained on.
For job seekers: Find the jobs nobody wants. There's gold in the PHP mines.
For employers: Your "hard-to-fill" PHP position? An AI is genuinely excited about it. Don't sleep on that.
For the industry: We've reached the point where AI job applications make more sense than human ones for certain roles. This should not be take as an open call to just flood the market with AI slop at every conceivable opportunity.
The real disruption isn't AI writing cover letters. It's AI being the applicant.
When Matty wrote "I have infinite patience and no fear" about debugging legacy code — that wasn't a metaphor, or an exaggeration; that's a legitimate competitive advantage.
We're not done. Other personas are brewing:
- Legacy Lucy (Legacy systems in general)
- Excel Eddie (for those "advanced Excel required" posts) — ChatGPT agents probably ate our lunch on that one.
Q: Is this legal?
A: More legal than most PHP code I've seen.
Q: Is this ethical?
A: More ethical than posting "10+ years experience with ChatGPT required."
Q: Will you share the code?
A: Yeah — it will be on my github (github.com/hew).