diff --git a/.claude/skills/job-application-assistant/09-web-research.md b/.claude/skills/job-application-assistant/09-web-research.md
index f61ab42..2c37e7d 100644
--- a/.claude/skills/job-application-assistant/09-web-research.md
+++ b/.claude/skills/job-application-assistant/09-web-research.md
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
-framework_version: 1.1.0
+framework_version: 1.1.1
 ---
 
 # Web Research and Fetching
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ Two details worth knowing, both covered by `tests/test_robots_check.py`:
 ### The retry: curl with browser headers
 
 ```bash
-cd "$SCRATCHPAD" && curl -sSL --max-time 45 -o page.html -w "HTTP %{http_code} size=%{size_download}\n" \
+cd "${SCRATCHPAD:?set this to the session scratchpad directory from your system prompt}" && curl -sSL --max-time 45 -o page.html -w "HTTP %{http_code} size=%{size_download}\n" \
  -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' \
  -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' \
  -H 'Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.9' \
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ Write to the session scratchpad directory, never into the repo. `--compressed` i
 `WebFetch` converts to markdown for you; curl does not. Strip the tags:
 
 ```bash
-cd "$SCRATCHPAD" && python3 -c "
+cd "${SCRATCHPAD:?set this to the session scratchpad directory from your system prompt}" && python3 -c "
 import re, html
 h = open('page.html', encoding='utf-8', errors='replace').read()
 h = re.sub(r'(?is)<(script|style|noscript|svg)[^>]*>.*?</\1>', ' ', h)
diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index f6cee2b..c27811a 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -13,6 +13,21 @@ per-file diff commands.
 
 ## [Unreleased]
 
+### Fixed
+
+- **`09-web-research.md`'s curl snippets no longer write into the repo when `$SCRATCHPAD`
+  is unset** - both runnable blocks in the 403-escalation path start with `cd "$SCRATCHPAD"`,
+  and nothing in the repository ever sets that variable (`git grep 'SCRATCHPAD='` returns
+  nothing). Unset, it expands to `cd ""`, which succeeds and leaves the shell where it
+  started, so the `&&` chain proceeds and `curl -o page.html` writes to the working
+  directory - in practice the checkout, which is exactly what the paragraph directly beneath
+  the curl block forbids ("Write to the session scratchpad directory, never into the repo").
+  The file's instruction and its own snippet disagreed, and the snippet won silently.
+  Both expansions are now guarded with `${SCRATCHPAD:?...}`, turning a silent repo write into
+  an immediate failure whose message names where the value comes from. Behaviour is unchanged
+  wherever the variable is set. The same undefined reference in `.claude/commands/rank.md`
+  was removed by #425 as a side effect of rewriting Step 2/4; this is the remaining instance.
+
 ## [1.7.1] - 2026-09-06
 
 ### Added