My agent said I have a visibility problem

I came to the US from India in August 2022, fresh out of my first job, which I had quit before I'd even booked my visa slot, let alone got an approval. I had a confidence back then that I could pull it off: I would get the visa and be in the States as planned. And it happened.

Within the first month there was the chase for an on-campus job to cover expenses, then for internships, then for a job, then for another visa. Rat races, one after another.

Fortunately, I ended up at LEI, the Learning Engineering Institute at ASU, a very loving workplace with excellent colleagues and lots of inspiring folk around me. Over the last couple of years I built my skills and competencies, from being responsible for my own contributions to mentoring, running a design practice and a team, and being responsible for the team's inputs. It is rewarding, and I'm grateful.

But somewhere at the back of my head there were restless, anxious nights when I wondered why I didn't get an internship when I wanted one, and why I didn't get a job when I searched for one. I graduated in May 2024 and got into full-time at LEI in December 2024. Practically the whole of 2024 I spent applying to about 2,500 jobs, begging for referrals from friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, and following every tip, trick, seminar and YouTuber. Nothing. Radio silence. It built an imposter syndrome in me. Had I made the wrong decision?

So, as any techie with access to AI agents would, I told my story in detail and, over time, asked Claude why. And it said:

Nishad, you don't post enough. No one knows you outside your workplace.

Somewhere in mid-March 2026, it came to me in a pang: why had all of it happened to me? So I started a session in Claude Code with PAI, Daniel Miessler's personal AI agents, and talked to my agent about what I didn't do and what I did. Sometimes it pointed out that the world's timing and events weren't aligned. Sometimes it pointed out that my own timing was late, or my moves absent. But mostly, over and over, the conversation came back to one point: I have no visibility outside my workplace.

Why, I asked. What do you mean by visibility? What do you mean my applications and referrals were already duds?

And it said that in a market like the US, I have little to no value as a stranger, especially in a niche field like design, where a project needs far fewer designers than engineers, and needs them for a shorter part of its life. At LEI, I'm working on at least three projects at any given time, each with its own stakeholders.

I understand the logic. In a competitive market, maybe I played the wrong cards.

But why do I even care about the right cards? I was the only designer at LEI when I started. Over time I built the team, established the practices and led the way. But along the line, as I mentored others, I realised the value of a mentor, and the absence of one in my own career. There are platforms like Topmate and ADPList, and I've used them extensively, but a one- or two-hour session is good for a Q&A, not for building a relationship. I yearned for that, and I still do.

So I asked my agents again: why don't I have it? And it said: who knows you? Why would an outsider give it to you? Then it spat out a few names of other designers, peers in various places. They put themselves out there, they receive and provide value from the community of designers and engineers, and they build their networks. They know someone, and someone knows them. Thus, visibility. I have personally seen these who-knows-who networks help people go places. Yes, talent and skills, definitely, but also presence helps too.

You'd think, if I already knew this back in April or May, or maybe earlier, then why, even as I write this piece on the evening of October 29, 2026, have I put nothing out? No presence. Where did I put my last six or so months?

Short answer: look at my portfolio. I published a research tool. I contributed to two papers that aren't released yet but are in active blind review. I published three applications the ASU community uses, built tools and technology, even showcased them in workshops and expos. I rebuilt my portfolio from v3 to v4 to v5, some versions built just to be abandoned, and reviewed every single detail of them. I built a cat mascot. I spent four days just recalling my projects and building their narratives, and three days on a 120-second film for LIVE, the filmmaking system I built.

Then my agent said:

Nishad, how did you not see it? It's all there, but not once have you told anyone outside your circle about it.

Another agent, Codex, put it less kindly when I asked it for an unfiltered roast. Visibility OS was the system I had set up to run my own visibility:

You built Visibility OS and gave invisibility a folder structure. Your April pipeline had nothing actively being written, while the vault had a seven-phase infrastructure plan. You created a waiting room for a waiting room.

It kind of explains what was happening. I can obsess over the details and the polishing of my works, but never publish anything. Again and again, I avoided it. I poured my time into the work, yes, but never into telling. I'm a long-time student of history, and history mostly remembers the people someone wrote or told about. I wasn't giving anyone much to tell.

I have engaged with the community: two meetups in total, ASU Design Exchange talks and meetings twice, and I posted in those internal ASU groups a whole three times. Again I asked why. Why didn't I stay consistent?

The chain of whys started, and it ended here: I burnt myself out so much in the internship and job application stages that I developed a fear, a fear of rejection, after 2,500+ "we're glad you applied, but we've decided to move forward with another candidate" emails. I developed a need for instant validation, and when real engagement never gave me anything, I just shut off. I clammed up, turned inwards, and started this pattern of avoidance. I posted on LinkedIn as well, but when? Twice a year. And what? Just an update or an obligatory post. The ones my posts reached were my dearest friends and a few colleagues, who were kind enough to say nice things. I needed that, and I also needed the wider community, and the conversations that come with it.

Realization after realization, maybe. But what did I learn, and what do I do now? Codex had a warning for that too:

Your self-analysis can become another way to postpone the ordinary action that would test your assumptions.

The push came from a colleague and friend from a professional academic research background. In research, she told me, venues, publications, convenings and the h-index matter a lot. You need to be published out there, and published as an individual, just to get anywhere. It's a built-in requirement of the profession, and I should use it too: treat everything I put out into the world as an output, and as a genuine metric of my own work and success. Doing that exposes me to others, and to criticism, which is exactly the fear she diagnosed in me. So this is my attempt at overcoming it.

It's yet another experiment: to engage with the community consistently and willfully, even if my own nature, or the nurture I've developed, goes against it. Something of mine goes out every week, and I learn from whatever comes back, the silence and the criticism included. The agent's answer, that visibility is what I was missing, stays a hypothesis until I test it. Maybe it was the missing piece, maybe it wasn't. Either way, I'll learn more from putting things out than from another round of asking why.

So treat this essay as the first output: out in the open, for anyone to read, react to, and criticise.