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Cover letter prompt — the line not to cross when AI writes your application
What must never be invented and what may be proposed are different things. How to write that boundary into the request.
By Mephify (operator)4 min read
What makes this hard
A cover letter or personal statement carries two opposing demands at once: nothing fabricated, yet persuasive with the material you have. If the request doesn't set that balance, AI collapses to one side.
Each collapse looks like this. The fabricating side: projects you never ran, awards you never won, numbers you never produced blend in naturally, and one interview question about that sentence ends everything. The over-cautious side: a skeleton where every line reads [fill in: achievement metric]. After you fill it all in, you have written the thing yourself anyway.
What can't be invented vs. what may be proposed
This distinction is the core. Factual claims cannot be invented. Intent and direction are not factual claims.
- Never invented — company names, job titles, employment dates, awards, performance numbers. If it's not in the material you provided, it must not be in the text
- Fine to propose — post-hire goals, how to phrase a reason for leaving, career direction. These are your views, not facts, and editing a draft beats starting from blank
Write the distinction into the request and the AI treats the two differently. Facts stay blank; the rest comes as a proposed draft with a request for your confirmation.
Put it like this
Use only the experience and numbers I gave you. Invent nothing. But for things I need to decide, like post-hire goals or motivation, don't leave blanks: propose a draft and ask me to confirm.
The structure for writing one experience
Listing experiences leaves the reader unsure what to look at. Make it write situation → action → result, and each paragraph becomes one piece of evidence.
- Situation — what was the problem. Don't spend long explaining company context here
- Action — what did *I* do. Not 'our team', but 'I'
- Result — what changed. With numbers if you have them; without, if you don't
Write experiences without numbers too. Saying there is no number is safer than making one up. The goal is to leave only sentences you can defend when an interviewer asks.
The instruction ends with questions, not a draft
This service's career-document instruction requires the target AI to do three things at the end. The point is to never hand you a document with blanks and a note saying 'fill these in yourself'.
- 1Collect everything that still needs filling into one place. The [FILL IN] slots scattered through the text are numbered, and each gets a line on what goes there and how to answer. For any performance number it also asks what will back that number up. 'ROAS 300%' is exactly where an interviewer asks for evidence
- 2Ask how to proceed, then stop. Three options: fill these in and it completes the document, complete it as structured now, or fix the structure first
- 3Ask for the template file if there is one. Good content in the wrong format has to be retyped, so it offers to reorganize to the template's sections and order
Once you answer, the completed version comes with the slots filled. Whatever you choose not to fill stays as a field for you to write yourself. A document with open blanks is never called final.
Four documents, four sets of material
The Career studio takes four kinds separately: cover letter, resume, experience dossier, and interview prep. They are all 'job documents', but each one needs different raw material.
- Cover letter — the questions, their length limits, and the posting's required skills come first. It asks for a mapping of which question answers which skill
- Resume — only fields the document must have, like contact details, stay as [FILL IN]. Nice-to-haves such as exact months or tools used are simply left out when missing, so the document doesn't become a field of blanks
- Experience dossier — it takes a length limit and chooses experiences within it. Cutting the number of experiences and cutting length are different jobs, and the instruction keeps them apart
- Interview prep — it takes your reason for leaving and your career direction as separate inputs. Those questions come up in nearly every interview, and cover-letter material alone doesn't produce the answers
Required skills in the posting that your material doesn't cover are not turned into blanks. Turning missing material into slots makes a document out of holes — instead it either says in one line that the topic isn't covered, or moves it to the pre-submission checklist as 'check whether you have material to support this skill'.
Checklist for writing it yourself
- 1Did you paste the job posting's required skills into the request? Without them you get generic prose
- 2Are the achievement numbers copied verbatim from your own material
- 3Did you state the per-question length limits
- 4Did you write both 'invent nothing' and 'propose the aspirational parts'? One without the other collapses to a side
Reading helps; trying is faster.