Resume Buddy

What it does

Resume Buddy makes editing a LaTeX resume feel like talking to someone who happens to be excellent at LaTeX. You bring your resume (or start from a template) and say what you want, like “add my new job at Acme,” “tighten the summary,” “tailor this for a senior backend role,” and it edits the underlying .tex and hands back a recompiled PDF.

The point is that you never touch LaTeX. You get LaTeX-quality typesetting with a conversational interface over the top.

How it’s built

It’s packaged as a Claude Code plugin with two moving parts:

• A bundled local LaTeX MCP server that gives the AI real tools (create, edit, validate, and compile .tex files) instead of guessing at markup. Compilation runs against any distribution with pdflatex on the path (TinyTeX, MiKTeX, MacTeX, TeX Live).
• Skills that drive the workflow end to end: init a starter resume, import an existing one, tailor to a job description, and build the PDF.

Install is two commands inside Claude Code (/plugin marketplace add, /plugin install) once uv and a LaTeX engine are present.

The opinionated part

It isn’t a blank LaTeX editor. The plugin bakes in resume principles distilled from the Dartmouth College CPD Resume Guide and techniques from career coach @jerryjhlee, so the AI isn’t just formatting text. It nudges toward resumes that actually read well to recruiters.

Why I built it

LaTeX produces the best-looking resumes and is the most annoying way to iterate on one. The bottleneck is never the typesetting engine, it’s the edit-compile-eyeball loop and remembering the syntax. Giving an AI genuine LaTeX tooling (not just a text box) plus a point of view on what makes a resume good removes both frustrations at once.