I spent the last couple of months building Reclaim — an AI job-search agent for engineers, done solo, taking up nights and weekends. It reads your résumé, scores it honestly, and matches you against real open roles. It's live at reclaim.careers (free scan, no signup).
This isn't a launch post — it's a breakdown of the stack and, more usefully, the things that broke. Here's how it's built.
The stack
Frontend — Next.js on Vercel. App Router, server components where it made sense. Vercel for hosting because the deploy-on-push loop is frictionless and I was optimizing for solo velocity, not infra control.
Backend — FastAPI on Render. I split the Python backend out rather than doing everything in Next API routes, because the heavy lifting (résumé parsing, the matching pipeline, scraping) is Python-native and I wanted it isolated from the frontend's request lifecycle.
