Why I built Coop.ai

For a few months I ran my search the way everyone does. I had a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, which was perfect for about a week and then quietly went out of date. I had a dozen tabs open for every company - LinkedIn, their site, Glassdoor, the news. And I had a ChatGPT window where I'd paste my resume and a job description for the fourth time that week, just to ask one question: is this actually a fit, or am I talking myself into it? Every new company meant building all of that back up from nothing. One night it finally got to me, and I started building something to fix it.

But the logistics were never the real problem. They were just the part I could point at.

A job is one of the biggest decisions a person makes, and almost no one gets to make it well. We make it tired. We make it a little scared. We make it at midnight, weighing two offers on a feeling, hoping we're not about to spend three years of our one life in the wrong room. Because that's what a job really is - not a line on a resume, but where your days go. Who you spend them with. Whether you respect the people across the table, and whether there's anything left of you by the time you get home. The search flattens all of that into a spreadsheet and a stack of tabs, and then it leaves you alone with it. Alone is the part no one warns you about. The line you swore you'd hold gets quieter every week, right next to the voice asking who you think you are to want more.

What I ended up with lives right where the search already happens - in my browser. Every posting I land on is one click from saved, and from there a click sets Coop to work: it researches the company, reads the role, and weighs it against everything it knows about me - the kind of work that actually stretches me, the people and cultures I do my best work around, the number I'm worth and won't go below, even the way I talk about myself. Not "does this job exist," but "is this one mine." From there, every company I'm talking to sits in one place that stays current on its own - my emails and my call notes attach to the right company by themselves - so the picture never rots the way that spreadsheet did. All of it runs on Claude, wired in directly, so the thinking behind it is genuinely good and I never have to touch the machinery to get it.

But the part that actually changed things is the advice. There's a chat built in, and before I type a single word it already knows everything - my background, the company, the job, the emails I've traded with people there, the notes from calls I've had. So instead of explaining myself from scratch every time, I just ask. "Given what we covered on that call, what should I lead with?" And it actually knows, because it's been paying attention the whole time. That's the whole idea. I stopped being the messenger running back and forth between a pile of tools and a chatbot, and let one thing hold the full picture.

And because it already holds all of that, it doesn't stop at advice - it does the work with me. The people I meet along the way get saved in a couple of clicks: a snippet here, a quick note there, captured in the moment and synthesized later, so a relationship is actually remembered instead of lost in some thread. When a role clears the bar, that same context turns into a resume tuned to the job, a cover letter I didn't have to start from a blank page, an outreach note that sounds like me instead of a template - even the follow-up I wouldn't have thought to make. The parts of a search I used to dread and put off, it just helps me get done, because it already knows enough to do them well.

That's the part of Coop I didn't plan, and the part I'd keep if I had to throw out everything else. It isn't that it remembers the facts. It's that you stop carrying the whole thing alone in your head at 11pm. There's something in your corner now that holds the full picture and wants nothing for itself - so you can finally ask the real question under all the noise: is this the right next move for the life you want, or just the next job you can take? That's the question loneliness makes hardest to hear. It's also the only one that matters.

That's really what Coop is. Not software, exactly - more like the most capable friend you've got: the one who knows your whole professional life and is honest enough to tell you the truth about it. Brilliant and realistic, in your corner without ever getting in your way. He makes the great-fit job feel less like a fantasy and more like a target you can actually hit. And unlike the smartest person you know, he never runs out of patience for it - he's right there when you open him, ready to pick up where you left off.

And it's bigger than any single job posting. A real search isn't a list of openings - it's a hundred small signals scattered across weeks. A coffee chat that went somewhere. A founder who mentioned they're hiring in the fall. A message thread that's been slowly warming up. On their own, each one slips through the cracks. Together, they're the actual story of where your search has momentum - and nobody can hold all of them in their head at once. Coop can. It makes sense of the conversations, not just the companies: which relationships are heating up, where I'm genuinely close, who I've let go quiet. So when I ask "who should I follow up with this week" or "where am I actually closest," the answer isn't a guess. It's read straight off the full board, by the one thing that's watched every move on it.

Coop is in a small private beta right now. I built it for my own search and I still run that search on it every day, which is the main reason it keeps getting better. I built it because I needed it - not just the tool, but the feeling of having someone thoughtful in the room while I made a decision this big. If that's where you are too, the beta page is a real form, and I read every one.