I've been a hiring manager for nine years, and I've started rejecting candidates who use generative AI to draft their cover letters. Last month I read 40 applications for one backend role, and 11 of them opened with nearly identical sentences about "passion for leveraging technology." I can't prove those 11 all used ChatGPT, and honestly the writing on its own isn't a firing offense — plenty of candidates have always reused templates. But the applications that felt human, with a specific bug they fixed or a project that flopped, were the ones I called. Should employers reject AI-written cover letters outright, or are we just nostalgic for a hiring ritual that never measured much anyway?