Auto-Arch Tournament vs Career-Ops

Auto-Arch Tournament is an autonomous research system where an AI agent iteratively proposes, implements, and validates microarchitectural improvements to a RISC-V CPU. Starting from a standard 5-stage pipeline, the loop runs hypotheses in parallel, each going through formal verification (53 symbolic checks), cycle-accurate simulation, multi-seed FPGA place-and-route, and CoreMark CRC validation. Only hypotheses that beat the current champion get merged; everything else gets discarded. Starting from 301 iterations/second, the system hit 577 iter/s (+92%) across 73 attempts in 9.8 hours — producing a design 26% faster and 40% smaller in LUTs than the baseline. The insight the author drives home is that the real innovation isn't the AI agent — it's the verifier. The orchestrator is hardcoded to prevent agents from manipulating their own evaluation gates, a simple but critical design constraint that turns a creative process into a trustworthy one. Without a rigorous verification harness, agent-driven optimization becomes a confidence trick. This is early but fascinating proof that AI-driven hardware design loops can produce commercially meaningful gains. The repo uses Claude Code or Codex as the coding agent, SystemVerilog for the RTL, and standard open-source EDA tooling (Yosys, nextpnr, Verilator). It's a compelling template for anyone building agentic optimization loops where correctness matters.

Career-Ops is an open-source job search automation pipeline built on top of Claude Code. Created by indie developer santifer after getting laid off, it scans 45+ company career portals in parallel, scores each listing A–F across 10 weighted dimensions (tech stack match, growth stage, remote policy, etc.), and auto-generates tailored ATS-optimized PDF resumes for every application — all from a terminal dashboard. The creator used it personally to evaluate over 740 job listings, generate 100+ personalized CVs, and eventually land a Head of Applied AI role. The whole pipeline runs locally, with no SaaS fees or data sharing — just your API key and a YAML config for your preferences and skills. What makes Career-Ops stand out is the combination of deterministic scoring with AI-generated personalization. The scoring rubric is user-configurable, so you can weight "remote-first" heavily or prioritize Series B startups. Released April 4, 2026, it hit 21k GitHub stars within four days and is trending on Product Hunt today — a rare indie tool that solves a genuinely painful problem.