/apply wrote a CV and a cover letter to disk and then wrote nothing to
job_search_tracker.csv, so a drafted and submitted application was
invisible to /gmail-sync, /html-report, /notion-sync, /interview,
/upskill aggregate mode, and to /rank's dedup exclusion. The safety net
that would have caught it - /gmail-sync - refuses to create missing
rows, so the failure it exists to catch is the one that disables it.
Nothing detected the loss afterwards.
Step 6b appends a drafted row carrying the two document paths, the fit
rating and the posting URL, reusing /outcome's exact header so the two
commands cannot diverge. It runs immediately after "Files Created" and
before the optional application-form offer, which ends the turn on a
question - anything placed after that offer would be skipped whenever
the user never answers, reproducing the bug. Re-running /apply updates
the row rather than duplicating it, and never moves a row that already
reached applied or beyond back to drafted. The step is mirrored into
job-application-assistant, which defers to it rather than restating it,
because /scrape Step 5 routes straight into the skill; /scrape Step 6
now defers to the same step instead of adding a row of its own.
seen_jobs.json is deliberately left alone: drafting is not applying, and
that file's vocabulary has no value for either. /rank builds its
exclusion set from company+role in the tracker regardless of status.
drafted is introduced into the status vocabulary, and every reader that
meant "submitted" is updated to say so. These readers define their open
set by exclusion from the final statuses, so a new non-final value would
otherwise have joined all of them silently: /outcome's follow-up branch
would have drafted a chase email to an employer who never received an
application, /gmail-sync would have searched for mail about it and then
flagged it as stale, /notion-sync would have published an "Applied on"
date for it, and /html-report would have counted it in the headline
application total. /outcome Step 4 also overwrites the draft date with
the submission date when a row leaves drafted, so the date column keeps
meaning "applied on". The wider vocabulary reconciliation - underscore
versus space, the separate archive enum - stays a separate concern.
* fix(web-research): stop treating a WebFetch 403 as a dead posting
WebFetch sends a bot user agent, and many bank and corporate sites answer
with HTTP 403 while serving the same page to a browser normally. Every
command treated that as "page unavailable" and degraded silently rather
than failing loudly:
- /rank marked live postings `expired`
- /apply fell back to search snippets, or to vague cover-letter prose
- /scrape stored listing-page `#fragment` URLs, which fetch fine and
return unrelated jobs, so every later /rank and /apply run on that
entry failed
Adds 09-web-research.md as the single reference: the trust boundary, a
curl browser-header retry with a tag-stripping extractor, a four-step
escalation order, the login-wall case, why the employer's own careers
posting beats an aggregator listing (the requisition ID and the grade
survive there), and the rule that a search-result snippet is a lead
rather than a source.
Wires it into /apply, /rank, /interview, /outcome, /notion-sync, the
job-scraper skill, and writing-style rule 5. Bumps 03-writing-style.md
to 1.2.0; 09-web-research.md starts at 1.0.0.
Aggregator examples are given generically (LinkedIn, Indeed, national
job boards) so the guidance holds in any market.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* fix(web-research): gate the browser-header retry on robots.txt
Addresses review feedback on #277.
WebFetch identifies itself as Claude-User and honors robots.txt, so a 403 has
two very different causes and they must not be treated the same: a WAF default
on a site whose published policy allows access, or a site that has actually
declined. Retrying with browser headers in the second case circumvents the very
opt-out mechanism site owners are told they can rely on, and the core framework
cannot hold a looser standard than it asks of community forks.
The escalation now runs tools/robots_check.py before the retry. A disallow for
"*" or for "Claude-User" skips the retry entirely and goes to step 3 (find the
employer's own posting). The rule is stated plainly in 09-web-research.md so
later edits do not erode it: the retry exists to get past bot-filtering
firewalls on sites whose robots.txt permits access; it is never used to
override a site that has said no.
Two findings from testing the gate against live sites, both pinned by
tests/test_robots_check.py (15 offline cases):
- The WAF usually blocks robots.txt too. privatebank.barclays.com returns 403
on the policy file to Claude-User and 200 to a browser, so a naive gate would
block the retry on exactly the sites the retry is for. The checker reads the
policy as a browser when the honest request is refused, then obeys it
strictly - a policy you are prevented from reading cannot be honored, and
robots.txt is not the protected resource.
- urllib.robotparser cannot be used. It ends a record at a blank line and
matches rules in file order, so Barclays' real file (blank lines between
"User-agent: *" and its rules, "Allow: /" before "Disallow: /cs/") reads as
everything-allowed. That fails open, in the one direction that matters. The
checker implements RFC 9309 longest-match instead, with ties resolved to
Disallow rather than Allow.
Verified live: barclays /careers/ allowed and /cs/ blocked, ubs.com allowed,
jobup.ch /api/ blocked while /en/jobs/ stays allowed. 09-web-research.md
1.0.0 to 1.1.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: kgb <kevingblackman@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* fix(cv-template): use ASCII hyphens and explicit ranges in CV date fields
LaTeX ligatures `--` into an en-dash (U+2013), so a `\cventry` date written
`2016--2024` reaches the PDF text layer as `2016<U+2013>2024`. Many ATS
parsers split date ranges only on an ASCII hyphen and therefore extract no
range at all. Separately, a bare single year gives the parser a start date
with no end.
Confirmed against a real Workday resume import: a CV built from this
template lost the end date of a short contract role and imported no
education entries whatsoever, forcing manual re-entry. The failure is
silent - extraction was otherwise clean, with literal contact details, no
(cid:) markers and correct reading order, so every existing check in the
ATS Parseability section passed.
- main_example.tex: date placeholders now use a single hyphen
- 05-cv-templates.md: document both causes, with examples, and add the
check to step 5d
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BFNdaj4fB6Xrd29PQ6hc9B
* chore(cv-template): bump framework_version to 1.4.0
The ATS date-format guidance added in the previous commit modifies a
framework template, which the CI framework version guard requires to be
accompanied by a version bump. Minor bump: new documented subsection,
no breaking change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* docs(changelog): record the CV date-field hyphen fix and fork reconciliation
Documents the U+FFFD extraction failure under lualatex, the fix, and the
framework_version bump. Includes the fork reconciliation note requested in
review: the five changed lines in cv/main_example.tex are the \cventry date
fields every fork personalizes, so rebasing forks should expect conflicts
there, resolve in favour of their own dates, and reapply the -- to - change
by hand. Adds a grep to locate remaining instances and a pdftotext check to
verify.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: kgb <kevingblackman@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nothing in the framework checks a posting's language requirements
against what the candidate actually speaks. It is not one of the five
Scoring Dimensions in 04-job-evaluation.md, it is not checked in
/scrape's Step 3 fit assessment, and it is not a field in /rank's JSON
output - even though /apply's Step 1 already extracts a posting's
required language generically, with nowhere to report a mismatch to.
This adds a Language Gate, structured like the existing Eligibility
Gate (read the posting, classify against profile data, hard-stop on a
real mismatch), built on a new structured Languages table in CLAUDE.md
/ 01-candidate-profile.md. /setup now asks for it directly (Path C), or
infers it from a CV/LinkedIn export (Paths A/B - LinkedIn exports
already carry a self-rated Languages section).
The gate compares a posting's stated language requirements against
that table with three outcomes:
- Requires a language not declared at all -> hard FAIL, never
presented.
- Requires a higher level in a language that is declared (e.g. "fluent
English" against a declared B1/B2) -> FLAG, not an auto-reject -
scored and drafted normally, with the gap surfaced so the candidate
judges it themselves (a "fluent" bar reads very differently from a
strict employer vs. one that's flexible on it).
- Requires a language at or below the declared level -> clean PASS.
Wired through the three places that need it: /scrape (Step 3), /rank
(new language_gate/language_note fields alongside the existing
location veto - both are now persisted to seen_jobs.json, not just
used transiently to decide one run's shortlist), and /apply (Step 1's
language extraction now has somewhere to report to).
Out of scope, deliberately: this does not touch the free-form
Deal-breakers list or how it's used elsewhere (e.g. Scoring Dimension
4's relocation check) - that's a separate question this change takes
no position on.
Validated with two live-testing passes against real, unfetched
postings (not fabricated text) across 3 portals and 3 market languages
(Danish, German, Spanish/Argentina): 8/8 postings gated correctly in
the first pass, including ambiguous real-world wording ("you
communicate well in English") a rigid rule would have gotten wrong. A
second pass, run specifically to force a hard-FAIL case, found one
(a Danish posting requiring the ability to read Danish) and confirmed
it persists correctly and would be excluded from /rank's shortlist.
Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* feat(08): add application-form fields as a third /apply artifact
/apply produces a CV and a cover letter. Many applications need a third
thing: free-text typed into a portal. Graduate programs, large-employer
ATS systems and startup forms ask for self-introductions, structured
project entries, motivation questions and pitches under a hard character
limit - none of which either document covers, and all of which the
interviewer reads alongside the CV.
Governing rule: a form field selects from what is already true and
arranges it for the question asked. It never introduces a new claim.
All accuracy rules from 03 and 05 apply unchanged.
Covers three field types (self-introduction, structured project entries,
hard character limits), the output format (a plain .txt the candidate
pastes from, with counts stated and internal NOTE TO SELF blocks marked
as not-for-pasting), and a verification checklist.
Two places where form fields are stricter than a CV, because both are
easy to get wrong:
- Project entries carry a name and a role, so they read as ownership of
the whole project in a way a terse CV bullet does not. Contributory
work has to be scoped inside the description.
- Project dates are the dates of the project, not of the employment.
Narrowing them is more accurate where the candidate can say when the
project started - but never invent a boundary to improve the ratio.
Registers the file in SKILL.md (framework_version 1.0.1 -> 1.1.0) and in
the FRAMEWORK_FILES list in tools/check_upstream_updates.py, so it is
covered by the update check like every other framework file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* fixup(08,apply): wire as optional /apply offer; align grounding to three-source union
- apply.md Step 6: offer the third artifact after CV/cover letter are
produced, mirroring the /outcome house pattern for optional capabilities
(offer, act only on yes, default output unchanged).
- 08-application-forms.md: ground claims against the framework's
01-candidate-profile.md + master CV + CLAUDE.md union (per #185)
instead of only 01, in both the governing rule and the checklist.
Per MadsLorentzen review on PR #212. Rebase onto merged #210 (the
tenure-check reference this file cites) still pending — #210 hasn't
landed on upstream/master yet.
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two profile-accuracy rules for the CV guide.
**In-progress qualifications.** A bare year range is not enough: an entry
reading 2025-2026, seen partway through 2026, reads as a finished degree,
because a skimming reader treats a closed range as closed. A profile
statement saying "currently completing" does not fix it - the education
entry is where a reader checks the credential, so it has to stand alone.
Claiming a credential not yet held is discovered at transcript or
reference check rather than at interview, and it costs nothing to
prevent. Adds the LaTeX form and a check that the profile statement,
education entry and any availability note agree on one completion date.
**Tenure against visible output.** A two-year role represented by a
single project reads as low output whether or not that is fair; the
reader cannot know what filled the time, so they guess. Hits career
changers, long-cycle work (industrial, clinical, research) and anyone
kept on a single account. Three honest fixes in preference order -
surface more real work, make the phases within the role explicit, name
what made the cycle long - and an explicit prohibition on the two
dishonest ones: never pad with invented projects, never quietly shorten
employment dates. Both are discoverable and worse than the perception
problem. If the ratio survives the fixes the interview question is
coming, so the answer belongs in interview prep rather than improvised.
framework_version 1.2.0 -> 1.3.0.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds a work-authorization eligibility dimension to 04-job-evaluation.md: whether the candidate is legally permitted to hold the role (citizenship/PR/visa requirements) as a hard filter, distinct from permit-timing. Country-agnostic, quotes the requirement source verbatim, treats silence as not-permission, and surfaces to the user rather than silently dropping. framework_version bumped 1.0.0 -> 1.1.0.
By @LeoWinston-9596 (split from #199). Note: the referenced /setup 'second gate' permit-timing collection isn't wired yet - a natural follow-up.
The moderncv template's section headings (Core Competencies, Professional Experience, Education, Languages, Publications, Honors and Awards, References) and the References boilerplate line are literal English text the workflow never translates, so a CV localized in prose can sit under English scaffolding. Adds an illustrative, fork-aware rule to 05-cv-templates.md (translate the headings too, whatever your template defines) plus a verification-checklist item in CLAUDE.md. Ties into the CV-language profile setting from #179.
By @Lautaro073. Heading list corrected against the stock template on review (Publications/Honors and Awards in, non-existent Independent Projects out; made illustrative for forks).
Seven improvements sourced from blind regression probes comparing current
outputs against real April-2026 baselines (each an area where the older
outputs scored better):
- every stated requirement addressed - matched or honestly gapped, never
silently omitted (the benchmark run omitted a stated Kubernetes
requirement entirely; omission reads as hiding under questioning)
- nice-to-haves engaged by name with honest adjacency framing; posting's
literal term preferred, including in CV section headings
- stated logistics/prerequisites addressed in the letter (clearances,
availability, job ID, multi-country language mapping)
- domain-transfer argument leads the CV profile statement for
domain-changers
- evidence links (href) on every verifiable named artifact
framework_version: 05 -> 1.2.0.
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both found by empirically re-running the /apply pipeline end-to-end:
06's Document Structure block still demonstrated itemize wrapped inside
lettercontent - the exact antipattern its own pitfall section forbids -
and following 05's needspace guidance at section level pushed an entire
Education block to a new page, costing a page instead of saving one.
framework_version: 05 -> 1.1.1, 06 -> 1.0.1.
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Completes the loop behind #177: /apply drift could be archived by
/outcome, then laundered into 05-cv-templates.md as a reusable template
by /setup Path A - promoting a one-off drifted claim into source
material for every future application. Path A now verifies extracted
statements' factual claims against 01-candidate-profile.md (keeping
framing only), and 05-cv-templates.md marks [Used for:] statements as
phrasing references, never fact sources. framework_version 1.1.0.
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Prompt-injection hardening from the dataflow analysis in #173 by @Defaultuser361: data-not-instructions rules in /apply and /rank, reviewer research constrained to the user-confirmed company identity, writing-style verify rule tightened to independently located sources (framework_version 1.1.0), SECURITY.md private reporting channel, README note. Closes#173.
CVs from /apply were named cv/main_<company>.tex, so a second role at the same company overwrote the first (cover letters already carried the role). Aligns CV naming to main_<company>_<role>.tex across apply, add-template, the CV template guide, CLAUDE.md, and SETUP.md; /outcome and /interview fallbacks glob main_<company>*.tex to match both legacy and new names. framework_version bumped on both touched framework files.
* Add framework_version markers to assistant skills and implement CI version guard and update checker
* Address review feedback: update ci.yml based on latest upstream, gate CI version guard to upstream repo, and remove non-ASCII characters from check_upstream_updates.py
Every PR to this repo is currently verified by hand. This adds the checks
a machine can do:
- latex-smoke: compiles cv/main_example.tex (lualatex) and the new
cover_letters/cover_example.tex (xelatex) in the texlive/texlive
container, failing on any LaTeX error. Exact page-count assertions
(CV=2, cover letter=1) run on the upstream repo only
- lint (tools/lint_skills.py, also runnable locally): every SKILL.md has
parseable YAML frontmatter with name+description (frontmatter breakage
happened before - 37a0eed), allowed-tools 'bun run <path>' targets
exist, command files start with a '# /<name>' title, settings.json is
valid JSON with a permissions.allow list
- cli-typecheck: bun install + tsc --noEmit for all five portal CLIs
(matrix, fail-fast off)
- placeholder-integrity (upstream only): tracked template files still
carry their placeholder tokens, catching accidental personal-data
commits before they land
Fork-friendly by design: /setup personalizes CLAUDE.md, the skill files,
and main_example.tex in forks, so placeholder checks and exact page
counts are guarded with github.repository == upstream; compile success
and lint run everywhere. Live CLI smoke tests are deliberately excluded:
network-flaky, and linkedin-search is personal-use-only per its own ToS
warning - CI-automated requests would violate it. CLIs are typechecked
instead.
The cover letter previously had no tracked example (cover_*.tex is
gitignored), so cover_example.tex is new: a placeholder letter following
the documented 06 structure, demonstrating the correct itemize-outside-
lettercontent pattern. It doubles as the structural reference /apply
Step 2 looks for on fresh clones, which until now matched nothing. The
gitignore exception is ordered after Cover_*.tex because case-insensitive
filesystems match that pattern against cover_example.tex too.
Writing it surfaced a latent bug in the documented template itself:
06-cover-letter-templates.md's structure ends with \closing{Kind
regards,\} - but cover.cls appends its own \, and the doubled break
produces '! LaTeX Error: There's no line here to end.' on every compile
(nonstopmode swallows it, so it went unnoticed). Fixed in 06 and noted
in the example.
An ATS reads the compiled PDF's embedded text layer, not the rendered page,
and LaTeX can silently produce PDFs whose text extracts as garbage: icon
glyphs where contact details should be, (cid:*) markers from fonts without
Unicode mappings, interleaved lines from multi-column layouts. This matters
more now that /add-template lets users bring arbitrary templates. The
existing Step 5 loop verifies what a human sees; this adds verification of
what a parser sees.
New Step 5d in /apply (CV only - cover letters rarely go through keyword
screening; cleanup renumbered to 5e):
- Extract the CV PDF's text layer with pdftotext -layout. pdftotext
(poppler) is an optional dependency: if missing, the mechanical check is
skipped with a warning and keyword coverage falls back to the visual PDF
read - the same graceful-skip pattern as salary_lookup.py
- Parseability checks verified against a real extraction of the stock
template: email/phone must survive as literal text (fontawesome icons
extract as harmless glyph-name noise like MOBILE-ALT/Envelope, but a
contact detail carried only by an icon or hyperlink is invisible to ATS),
no (cid:*) or replacement-character garbage, reading order matching
visual order, dates present
- Keyword coverage reuses the required/preferred list from Step 1, matched
in the posting's language, reported as covered / synonym-only /
missing-have-it / missing-gap. Honesty rule enforced: keywords the
profile genuinely supports get added to experience bullets; genuine gaps
stay visible, never stuffed
Integration: CLAUDE.md verification checklist section, ATS Parseability
guidance in 05-cv-templates.md, narrow Bash(pdftotext:*) entry in the
pre-approved permissions (keeping with the tightened scope from #27),
cv/*.txt gitignored (extraction is personal data; also deleted by the
step itself), and optional-dependency docs in README and SETUP.
Two additions to 05-cv-templates.md so the /apply workflow follows the
same patterns as cv/main_example.tex:
1. Add the three \renewcommand* lines to the documented preamble so
downstream CVs inherit the color1 overrides for firstname, lastname,
and section headings. Includes a short paragraph explaining the
reason and a note for users who prefer regular-weight firstname.
2. Add a "Spacing inside itemize lists" subsection that calls out the
inter-item \vspace anti-pattern with a wrong/right example and
explicitly preserves the two related patterns that DO render fine
(post-section spacer, inter-cventry \vspace{3pt}).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds a new Step 5 to the /apply workflow that compiles the CV (lualatex)
and cover letter (xelatex) and visually inspects the resulting PDFs before
presenting them to the user. This catches page-break failures that .tex
review cannot detect: orphaned cventry titles, cover letters spilling to
a second page, and bullet fonts not matching body text.
Also introduces relevance-weighted cutting as the rule for shrinking an
overflowing CV: score each candidate line by (a) relevance to the posting,
(b) uniqueness in the document, and (c) load-bearing role in the cover
letter, then cut the lowest-total-score line first, regardless of section.
This replaces the old static "cut oldest section first" heuristic, which
was wrong whenever a relevant older-role bullet competed with an
irrelevant recent-role bullet.
Bundled with the earlier pending token-efficiency improvements to the
/apply workflow (inline draft passing to the reviewer, scoped reviewer
file reads, single end-of-workflow verification pass).
Changes:
- .claude/commands/apply.md: new Step 5 (Compile & Inspect PDFs), renumber
old Step 5 to Step 6, update token-efficiency rules at top to reference
Step 6 for the verification checklist
- .claude/skills/job-application-assistant/05-cv-templates.md: switch
recommended compile engine from pdflatex to lualatex (pdflatex fails on
modern MiKTeX with fontawesome5 font-expansion errors), add
"Compile-and-Inspect Loop" section with needspace/enlargethispage
patterns, add "Relevance-weighted cutting" section
- .claude/skills/job-application-assistant/06-cover-letter-templates.md:
add compile command, add "Compile-and-Inspect Loop", document the
"\lettercontent{} + itemize" pitfall and the required font-matching
Raleway-Medium wrapper fix
- CLAUDE.md: add "Compiled PDF verification (MANDATORY)" checklist items
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jakob Stender Guldberg