Professor Doom

Inspiration

Resume feedback is boring. Every tool out there gives you the same generic advice - "add more keywords", "quantify achievements". I wanted something different. Something with personality.

Halloween season gave me the idea - what if a spooky professor roasted your resume? Like that one harsh professor in college who was brutal but you actually learned from. That's Professor Doom.

What it does

Professor Doom analyzes your resume and gives you brutally honest feedback with dark humor. But it's not just roasts - it's actually useful.

Core features:

Upload your PDF and get roasted on your skills, experience, and those buzzwords you thought were clever Chat with Professor Doom about specific sections - AI replacement risk, futureproof score, job eligibility Confession Booth - admit the lies on your resume and get advice on how to actually achieve those claims Summary Room - hear Professor Doom introduce you to the world with AI-generated voice (pick your language and pronouns) Learning Crypt - get real course recommendations based on your skill gaps Trends Chamber - see what skills are hot in your industry right now

How we built it

I don't have a coding background - been playing with vibe-coding platforms for a few months. Kiro made this possible.

Used Claude Opus 4.5 model in Kiro for most of the development. Honestly, it was pretty much error-free. The only times I ran into issues were when I wasn't clear enough about what I wanted - the AI can't read minds, so being specific matters. One thing that surprised me - integrating external APIs was way easier than I expected. I was scared of that part going in. But Kiro can crawl documentation pages from the internet, so it knew exactly how to set up Gemini, ElevenLabs, Murf, and Exa.ai without me having to figure out the API structures myself.

*Built it piece by piece: *

-Basic PDF upload and text extraction -Gemini AI integration for the roasting personality -Chat interface with different analysis modes -Spooky UI - floating particles, glowing buttons, custom skull cursor, candle animations -Video background using Veo 3.1 - created a skeleton professor image then generated a video from it Voice synthesis for the Summary Room -Exa.ai integration for real web search (courses, trends) The whole thing runs on Node.js/Express, deployed on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the personality right - First attempts were either too mean or too nice. Took a lot of prompt tweaking to hit that "harsh but helpful" sweet spot.

ElevenLabs credits ran out - Had voice synthesis working perfectly, then hit my monthly limit mid-development. Didn't know API and website credits were the same pool. Had to scramble and switch to Murf AI.

*Video positioning * - The skeleton professor kept getting hidden behind UI elements. Moved content to the left, added controls, made it auto-mute after 8 seconds.

AI hallucinations - Early versions would make up stuff not in the resume ("I see you have 24 pages of experience"). Added strict prompts to only use actual resume content.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Finished the whole thing while juggling college projects - tight schedule but made it work -Spent a lot of time on the UI and I'm genuinely happy with how it turned out -The Confession Booth concept - turning resume lies into a learning opportunity -Tested with friends' resumes and they really enjoyed the Summary Room feature - hearing Professor Doom introduce them was a hit *It's genuinely useful, not just a gimmick. *

What we learned

• Steering files in Kiro are powerful for keeping AI personality consistent
• Always check API credit limits before building features around them :)
• Small UI details (loading messages, animations, sound) make a huge difference
• Building iteratively beats trying to do everything at once

What's next for Professor Doom

The big one I want to add is voice input - actually talking to Professor Doom instead of typing, making it feel like a real conversation. Beyond that, I'm thinking resume comparison where you upload two resumes and see which one wins, LinkedIn profile analysis so it's not just PDFs, shareable roast cards for social media so people can flex their doom scores, and an interview prep mode where Professor Doom grills you with tough questions.

Built With

• claude
• exa.ai
• kiro
• node.js