The cover letters all sounded like one person

Somewhere in the middle of a stack of applications, I realized I was reading the same cover letter over and over, written by different people.

Same shape every time. A warm first line about being excited, three tidy paragraphs matching the job description back to me, a confident close. Nothing wrong in any of them. Most of them were clearly written with ChatGPT, which I don't hold against anyone. I use it all day.

The problem was that polish used to tell me something. A clean, specific letter meant someone had spent an evening thinking about my team. Now it costs a minute, so every letter has it, and it stopped telling me anything at all.

The one I called back wasn't the best written. She'd tried our product, said where it confused her, and guessed at why we'd built it that way. She was half right. That paragraph took her a while, and no prompt could have written it, because the answer came from actually using the thing.

So I'd stop trying to sound better than the pile. The pile sounds great now. Use AI for the structure and the typos, then put in one thing only you could know: something you tried, where it broke, what you'd ask the team about it. That's the sentence a hiring manager stops on.