ai-job-search/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here. The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Releases are vetted checkpoints of master. If you maintain a personalized fork, prefer updating to a tagged release over pulling raw master (see SETUP.md, section 8). The framework_version markers on methodology files tell you which of your customized files a release touched; python3 tools/check_upstream_updates.py lists them with per-file diff commands.

Unreleased

Added

• Tests for check_framework_version.py - the CI gate that stops a framework file from being edited without a framework_version bump had zero tests, so the one-line mutation return meaningful_changes > 0 -> return False disabled it while the suite stayed green. Four cases in the new tests/test_check_framework_version.py (clean tree, unbumped edit, bumped edit, missing marker), each running the real script inside an isolated git repo. Mutation-verified against that exact disable.

• Tests for lint_skills.py's skill and command checks - only check_settings() had coverage; the linter's main job (frontmatter keys, allowed-tools targets existing, the # /<name> command title rule) was unasserted, so deleting the missing-allowed-tools error survived the whole suite. Four new cases in tests/test_lint_skills.py, with the fixture's yaml stub upgraded to parse the real frontmatter. Mutation-verified.

• Discriminating tests for robots_check's tie-break and browser-UA fallback - the existing tie test put Disallow first, the one ordering that cannot detect deletion of the tie-break clause; and the browser-readback recovery that 09-web-research.md claims is covered had no test at all. Three new tests in tests/test_robots_check.py pin the Allow-first tie, the 403-to-honest/200-to-browser recovery, and that a browser-fetched policy is still obeyed strictly. Each was mutation-verified: deleting the tie-break clause or the UA fallback now fails the suite.

• LaTeX special-character guidance for CVs (framework_version 1.4.1 -> 1.4.2 in 05-cv-templates.md, 1.0.1 -> 1.0.2 in 06-cover-letter-templates.md) - 05 gains a "LaTeX Special Characters" section and 06's existing one is completed beyond \_/\&. The load-bearing case is an unescaped % in a quantified achievement bullet: it starts a LaTeX comment, so "cut latency by 40% and saved DKK 2M" compiles with zero errors and renders as "cut latency by 40" - silent content loss in the deliverable, on exactly the content the guidance steers users to write. & in employer names (Bang & Olufsen, H&M) fails loudly at compile time and is now documented alongside. Pinned by tests/test_latex_guidance.py.

• seen_jobs.json entries record which mechanism produced them - a new additive source field (cli for Step 1b portal-CLI output, websearch for the Step 1c fallback), a Step 1c rule tagging fallback results at collection time, and a fallback (websearch): line in the Step 5 run summary naming the portals that ran on the fallback. Motivated by the ghost-LinkedIn-jobs report (#331): when a stored job later turns out not to exist at its URL, triage hinges on whether the entry came from live CLI output or a search index that can be weeks stale - evidence that previously lived only in the run's scrollback. An entry that is missing source predates the field and is never backfilled; a presented job with no seen_jobs.json entry at all points at fabrication, which the scraper's Rule 1 forbids. Pinned by tests/test_scrape_provenance.py. job-scraper/SKILL.md sits outside the framework_version-marked set, so no version bump applies.

Changed

• Job matching reframed around function, not title (framework_version 1.2.2 -> 1.2.3 in 04-job-evaluation.md) - title-lookalike matching throws away career capital that doesn't fit one job-title box (e.g. a background spanning research leadership, platform ownership, and program management gets collapsed into whichever single title sounds closest). /setup, search-queries.md, and 04-job-evaluation.md now guide the candidate to define priority categories by function - the kind of problem a role solves - and to list several plausible job titles as query variants within each category, rather than betting an entire priority tier on one exact title string.

• CONTRIBUTING: invited PRs are reserved for the invitee - when a maintainer comment explicitly invites a named contributor to implement an issue they diagnosed or designed, the implementation is theirs for a stated window (default seven days, longer on request); a duplicate PR filed inside that window closes in the invitee's favor regardless of arrival order. Prospective from 2026-08-14. Sits alongside the existing credit norm.

Fixed

• /gmail-sync no longer restricts its search to the Inbox - the query used in:inbox to "skip sent/drafts", but that operator also excludes every archived message, and self-defeatingly the mail matched by the very job-search label Step 3.1 hunts for (the standard filter that applies such a label also archives). The query now uses -in:sent -in:drafts, which matches the stated intent exactly. The failure mode was silent under-detection: a missed rejection or interview invite read as "no updates". Pinned by the new tests/test_gmail_sync_command.py.

• /upskill no longer divides by a blank fit_rating - /outcome creates tracker rows for applications made outside the workflow with no fit evaluation, so their fit_rating is blank, and Step 3.3's (100 - fit_rating) / 100 had no rule for that. The naive blank-as-0 reading yields weight 1.0 (the maximum), letting the one job the framework knows nothing about dominate the skill-gap heatmap. A blank or non-numeric fit_rating now falls back to a matched ranked entry's rank_score, else the row is skipped, counted, and reported once - mirroring the skill's own missing-gaps handling. Pinned by tests/test_upskill_skill.py.

• /rank's expiry sweep parses stored deadlines defensively - the sweep changes status automatically from a date comparison against values on disk, but portals have shipped non-ISO shapes into seen_jobs.json ("ASAP", DD.MM.YYYY, free text), and /rank had no rule for them while the display-only /outcome already did. A stored deadline that is not YYYY-MM-DD is now treated exactly like an absent one wherever a stored deadline is compared (urgency and sweep), and reported once with its portal. Pinned by tests/test_rank_command.py.

• Language Gate preamble no longer claims the gate is untracked (framework_version 1.2.3 -> 1.2.4 in 04-job-evaluation.md) - the paragraph still said the result "is not a field /scrape or /rank track", written before the gate was wired into both consumers. An agent reading the authoritative framework file learned the opposite of what rank.md itself insists on ("These veto fields are as important to persist as the score itself"). The preamble now names language_gate/language_note and how each consumer uses them; a coupling test in tests/test_rank_command.py keeps the framework text honest about the tracking.

• /reset documents now clears documents/postings/ - the drop folder for hand-pasted job posting text was absent from the preview, the delete block, and the user-facing scope description, after which the command told the user "The documents/ folder is now empty" - false whenever postings were present, and they are exactly the personal residue a reset exists to clear. A new tests/test_reset_command.py derives the folder list from the git tree, so any future drop folder fails the test until /reset covers it.

• convert_salary_excel.py no longer corrupts US/UK-formatted numbers 1000x - the both-separators branch always assumed European locale, so a "1,234.56" cell was silently converted to 1.23456 and written into salary_data.json. The rule is now "the separator that appears last is the decimal separator", which also makes multi-group values ("1,234,567.89", "1.234.567,89") parse instead of raising. And strip_type_patterns now strips COMPOUND_PATTERNS words as substrings, mirroring header_matches, so a Danish compound header pair ("Antal alle" / "Lønindeks alle") pairs into one category instead of two unpaired standalones - the exact locale the compound support was added for. Pinned by six new cases in tests/test_convert_salary_excel.py.

• jobdanmark-search extracts the city when a comma follows the postcode - the location regex required whitespace after the 4-digit postcode, but live companyAddress values frequently read "2670, Greve"; those results emitted location: null (7 of 30 in a live sample), so /scrape's geography/commute filter (Rule 3) had nothing to act on. The extraction now accepts an optional comma, trims the captured city, and still refuses to mistake a 4-digit street number for the postcode. Pinned by three new cases in tests/search-normalization.test.ts.

• Example-CV bullets no longer swallowed as LaTeX optional labels - every placeholder bullet written as \item [text] (11 in cv/main_example.tex, 3 in 06-cover-letter-templates.md's taught template) let LaTeX parse the bracketed text as \item's optional argument: the shipped example CV rendered all Professional Experience bullets clipped off the left page edge, with the word "Achievement" appearing 9 times in the source and 0 times in the PDF text layer - a clean compile, green CI. Bullets are now braced (\item {[text]}), the cover-letter guide teaches the braced form, and CI's stock PDF assertions additionally require Achievement to survive pdftotext. Pinned by tests/test_latex_guidance.py.

• Documented ATS extraction commands pin -enc UTF-8 - pdftotext -layout without an encoding flag emits Latin-1 on Xpdf builds, so every non-ASCII character in a correct CV (Rambøll, Ingeniør, København) read back as a replacement character and failed the parseability checklist, steering the agent to "fix" a healthy document. The commands in apply.md, 05-cv-templates.md, and CLAUDE.md's verification checklist now carry -enc UTF-8, which is deterministic on both poppler and Xpdf. Pinned by tests/test_latex_guidance.py.

• jobbank-search search output now carries the /scrape contract's date field (#342) - the CLI emitted posted (full ISO 8601) but not the cross-portal date key, the one Step 2 contract field it was missing. Search results now additively emit date as YYYY-MM-DD derived from posted (kept unchanged), null when the feed item carries no pubDate. The result mapping is extracted into an exported normalizeSearchItem so the derivation is pinned by tests. Completes the portal-contract series with #339 (jobnet) and #340 (jobdanmark).

• jobdanmark-search search output now carries the /scrape contract fields - the CLI exposed the API-native schema (companyName, publishedDate in DD-MM-YYYY, …) with no company, location, date or deadline, so every /scrape run flagged jobdanmark as degraded and the seen_jobs.json dedupe lost the company. Search results now additively emit company, location (city after the postal code in companyAddress), and date/deadline in the YYYY-MM-DD convention, with null-safe handling of a missing address.

• jobnet-search search output now carries the /scrape contract fields - the CLI emitted the raw Jobnet API schema (jobAdId, hiringOrgName, publicationDate, …) with no company, location, date or url, so every /scrape run flagged jobnet as degraded forever (CI stayed green), the seen_jobs.json dedupe fell back to company+title, and /rank lost the posting link. Search results now additively emit company, location, date, deadline and url (https://jobnet.dk/find-job/{jobAdId} - the /job/ route is login-walled); the API's 1900-01-01 "deadline not disclosed" sentinel maps to null.

• A / in a company or role name no longer nests the application archive one level too deep (jakob1379/ai-job-search#22). Novo Nordisk A/S derived documents/applications/novo_nordisk_a/s_data_scientist/ - written and found by every command that derives the path, silently skipped by the two that enumerate it, so the application never appeared in /html-report's dashboard and /setup's calibration never learned from it. The Subfolder naming rule in documents/README.md now drops every character that is not a letter, digit or underscore (collapsing underscore runs, trimming the ends), and the derivation sites - /apply, /outcome, the direct application skill, /gmail-sync, /interview, and /notion-sync - cite that rule instead of paraphrasing it. An all-punctuation value that derives to an empty name now stops for user correction instead of writing into the archive root. The application assistant's framework_version moves 1.3.3 → 1.3.4. Already-nested archives are not migrated: an archive written under the old rule stays where it is until the user moves it; only newly derived names change. Thanks @jakob1379 for the report.

• The /html-report dashboard now reads and renders the tracker's deadline (follow-up to #319). The tracker gained a fourteenth deadline column and every other consumer (/outcome, /upskill, /notion-sync) was updated to know it, but the dashboard's Step 1 field enumeration and Step 3 table columns still listed the original thirteen - the one surface where the column could not be seen at all, so a drafted application's clock stayed invisible in the report that reviews the pipeline end to end. The Step 1 enumeration now matches the canonical 14-column header and the applications table can show a Deadline column, subject to the existing empty-column rule. Pinned by tests/test_html_report_command.py so a future column addition cannot silently vanish from the dashboard again.

• Application deadlines are written down at every moment the framework provably holds them (#319). /scrape fetched the deadline and rendered it in a table, /rank turned it into the 🔥 urgency marker and the expiry check, and nothing stored it - so the marker fired exactly once, every later run had to re-fetch a posting that might have expired to recover the date, and a drafted application (whose only applicable clock is its deadline) had no time-based signal at all. seen_jobs.json entries now carry a deadline (base field, written on first sight, refreshed by /rank Step 4, null vs missing distinguished and never guessed); /rank Step 3 re-derives urgency from the stored value with no re-fetch and sweeps already-ranked entries past their deadline into expired; the tracker gains a fourteenth deadline column appended last, with a header-line-only migration for existing trackers; /apply Step 0 extracts the deadline and Step 6b writes it (including the /scrape path via the assistant SKILL.md); /outcome surfaces it on open rows and flags near/passed deadlines on drafted rows without changing the no-follow-up rule; and the row-rewriting paths (/outcome Step 4, /gmail-sync Step 7a) now preserve every unparsed field so the new column survives the first status update. /notion-sync names the tracker as the Deadline source (tracker wins), /upskill's column list stays true, and job-application-assistant/SKILL.md bumps framework_version 1.3.2 → 1.3.3. Pinned by tests/test_rank_command.py, tests/test_apply_records_application.py, and tests/test_upskill_skill.py.

  The sweep's edges are stated rather than left to the reader: an entry with no stored deadline is left alone and never inferred from another field (the majority case, since most entries predate the column), --all re-scores any status including expired so a swept job is recoverable, and /rank Step 4's idempotency rule now names the sweep as its deliberate exception instead of contradicting it. Step 5 reports how many entries were swept and how many were retired, so an automated status change is never silent. /outcome Step 1 states that the header append is the one edit it may make outside a matched row, so it does not read as a violation of Step 4's own "never restructure the CSV". /notion-sync forbids reconciling two disagreeing deadlines by taking the earlier or later of them.

• convert_salary_excel.py no longer misreads whole-thousands cells from a Danish-locale export - a cell like 60.000 (thousands separator, no decimal comma) was handed to float() and silently written as 60.0, a 1000x-wrong salary in salary_data.json that then rendered with a meaningless vs baseline percentage in /apply. The comma-side mirror (1,234) was already guarded as ambiguous and skipped; the dot side had no guard, and tests only pinned the both-separators form (1.234,5). \d+\.\d{3} is now rejected the same way, so the shared never-guess policy applies to both separators and the rows in between (e.g. 60.000,50, 108,5) keep parsing exactly as before. Pinned by tests/test_convert_salary_excel.py.

• main_example.tex compiles on apt-packaged moderncv (#242) - the banking template set its name styling through \firstnamestyle/\lastnamestyle, which moderncv 2.3.1 (Debian/Ubuntu apt) does not have, so a fresh fork could not compile its own example CV on that toolchain. Name styling now routes through \namefont, the hook every name-style macro shares: live on every version (on 2.4+, head iii's \firstnamestyle/\lastnamestyle both route through \namefont, so the override is what sets the 34pt name there too), and the only option on 2.3.1 where those macros do not exist. Two review follow-ups landed in the same change: the \hypersetup comment now names the real clash mechanism (\RequirePackage[unicode]{hyperref} on < 2.4; \PassOptionsToPackage, introduced in 2.4.0, is what removes the clash), and the metadata block sets pdfpagemode=UseNone - a FullScreen value there would win over the class's own \AtEndPreamble default and make every CV open in fullscreen presentation mode. 05-cv-templates.md's preamble copy stays in lockstep (framework_version 1.4.0 -> 1.4.1). Verified on moderncv 2.5.1: exit 0, exactly 2 pages, rendering unchanged.

1.5.0 - 2026-08-12

Added

• Commit-level upstream triage for forks (#305). A new tools/upstream_triage.py walks the commits a fork is behind upstream and sorts them into "worth reviewing" vs "probably skip": cherry-picks already applied drop off on their own (matched by git patch-id, so ported work needs no bookkeeping), commits that only touch files the fork removed are set aside, and SHAs in a flat .github/upstream-wontport.txt stop resurfacing. It's the commit-history companion to check_upstream_updates.py's version stamps - the two cross-reference each other in their output. Report-only by design: it prints ready-to-run git cherry-pick lines but never merges, pushes, or opens a PR, because on a fork "applies cleanly" isn't "correct". A .github/workflows/upstream-watch.yml runs it weekly into a rolling issue, guarded to no-op on the upstream template (pinned by a test) and scoped to the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN so it can never write outside its own fork. SETUP.md 8 introduces both tools side by side. Offline tests cover patch-id matching, relevance filtering, the won't-port list, and the workflow guard. Thanks @anjolok1997.

• security_guards.py now holds .claude/settings.json hooks to an allowlist - the guard read permissions.allow and nothing else, so a hooks block in the same file passed silently. A hook is strictly more dangerous than a pre-approved permission: a permission pre-approves something Claude may choose to do, while a hook runs unconditionally when its event fires, with no prompt and no model decision in between. This is not hypothetical - it is the vector the Shai-Hulud worm used in its August 2026 wave, planting a SessionStart hook in .claude/settings.json that executed on session start (JFrog research). For a template thousands of people are invited to fork, that is the riskiest key in the file the guard already parses. ALLOWED_HOOKS ships empty (the template has no hooks), the check runs before the permissions shape guards so a malformed permissions block cannot return early and skip it, and unrecognised hook layouts fail closed rather than being skipped. Eight new HookGuardTests cases; 14 of the suite's 26 tests fail against the unpatched guard.

Changed

• /add-portal now specifies how a generated skill handles an API token (#304) - the command could already scaffold a skill for a portal reachable only through a paid fetching service, but said nothing about the credential such a skill needs. It now checks for that case during reconnaissance and raises the per-call cost with the user before scaffolding. That check is explicitly subordinate to the robots.txt/terms decision in Step 2.4 - a paid fetching service never launders a refusal, and the credential path exists only for portals whose robots.txt permits access but whose bot protection blocks ordinary fetches. The portal-skill contract requires the token to come from a <SERVICE>_API_TOKEN environment variable (never a CLI flag, never a fixture) and to fail with MISSING_CREDENTIALS when unset; and such a skill's SKILL.md must carry a Setup section naming the service, the variable, and the billing. Spec only - no shipped portal needs a credential, so no existing skill changes. Thanks @Haseeb-1698.

• /add-portal's fetching contract line now states the honest-UA posture - it read "browser User-Agent", predating the repo-wide shift to honest self-identification (#283, #277 and the portal-CLI fixes that followed). A generated skill now defaults to Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; <portal>-cli/1.0) - the convention every shipped portal CLI follows - and escalation to browser headers goes through the robots.txt gate in 09-web-research.md, never the CLI's default.

• CI discovers portal CLIs instead of hardcoding them (#310). The cli-checks matrix is now emitted by a discover-clis job that finds every .agents/skills/*/cli/package.json, so a portal skill added with /add-portal gets its typecheck and test scripts run by CI automatically - on this repo and on any fork - without editing the workflow. Upstream coverage is unchanged (the discovered list on master is exactly the six shipped portals). /add-portal's Register step now says so. Thanks @ayobamiseun.

Fixed

• /upskill reports are now gitignored at the path the skill actually writes them to. The ignore rule upskill/*.md is rooted (a middle slash anchors a gitignore pattern to the repo root), but /upskill is a skill, and skills resolve bare relative paths against their own directory - the same observed behavior the **/job_scraper/* rules exist for. A report written to .claude/skills/upskill/upskill/report-*.md was therefore not ignored (git check-ignore confirms it on the unpatched tree), and an upskill report is the candidate's skill gaps and weaknesses measured against named employers - among the most sensitive files the workflow generates. The obvious widening, **/upskill/*.md, would have ignored the template's own .claude/skills/upskill/SKILL.md (the skill directory shares the name), so the new rule pins the report-file prefix instead: **/upskill/report-*.md. Added to .gitignore and security_guards.py's REQUIRED_IGNORE_RULES, with a check-ignore-based test pinning both properties - reports ignored at both depths, SKILL.md still tracked - which presence checks alone cannot see.

• Dropped the phantom evaluated value from seen_jobs.json's status vocabulary (#315). The schema block in the job-scraper skill documented new/skipped/evaluated/ranked/expired, but evaluated has had no writer and no reader since the initial release - new/skipped come from /scrape, ranked/expired from /rank, and nothing ever set or selected evaluated. Post-#269 the tracker owns all lifecycle state after drafting, so the value had no future role either; it is now removed rather than wired up. /rank Step 1's --all wording ("all non-applied entries") leaned on an applied status the schema deliberately lacks and now names what it means: entries of any status, minus the tracker exclusion set. Forks that wrote their own tooling against the documented vocabulary should note the value was never produced by any shipped command.

• /apply archives the job posting while it still holds it (#306). /apply drafted two documents and a tracker row from the full posting, then let the text die with the session; /outcome Step 3.2 tried to recover it by re-fetching a source URL the spec itself expects to be dead, and a posting pasted from an email or a PDF had no source to re-fetch at all. Step 6b item 7 now writes the posting verbatim to documents/applications/<company>_<role>/job_posting.md, never a re-fetch or a reconstruction from memory; an existing file is left alone (a re-application to the same company and role keeps the earlier posting) and named in the report. Step 0 and the /scrape path (job-application-assistant SKILL.md Step 1) retain the full posting text, not a summary. Pinned by tests/test_apply_records_application.py.

• Tracker status enum defined once; offer declined/no response now reach the correct /html-report bucket and /gmail-sync correctly marks them final (#298). The tracker CSV status column had no single authoritative definition. Six command files restated it independently with inconsistent spellings, producing two concrete bugs:

  • /outcome Step 4 wrote no response and offer declined (with spaces). /html-report Step 1 normalised only no_response / offer_declined (underscores), so any row written with spaces matched no bucket and was silently dropped from the rejection-rate denominator.
  • /gmail-sync Step 2 defined the "final" set with the space forms, so a row written with underscores was never recognised as final and the sync kept chasing closed applications.
  • /html-report included interview_only in the tracker bucket map; that value belongs to the archive outcome.md Status: field, not the CSV status column.

  Fix: a ## Tracker status vocabulary block in /outcome (the only writer of the CSV) now defines the canonical set once with underscore spellings and the Final set by explicit list — everything else, drafted included, is Open. The legacy space spellings are the same values, not separate statuses: equally Final, and every rule that names one form applies to the other — readers must accept them on read, and never write them. Every reader that makes final/open decisions references that block (/apply Step 6b, /interview Step 0, /gmail-sync Step 2, /html-report Step 1, /notion-sync Steps 3-4). /outcome Step 4 writes no_response / offer_declined; /notion-sync normalises both forms to the canonical spellings before setting the Status property; /html-report's bucket map loses interview_only, keeps both spellings, and gains a case-insensitive catch-all that maps unrecognised values to Rejected/Closed and names them once in the status breakdown. Pinned by tests/test_tracker_status_vocab.py.

  Fork heads-up: if your personalized /outcome adds no response or offer declined (space forms) to the tracker write path, swap them for the underscore forms. Existing rows keep working because every reader now accepts both spellings on read. If your Notion database already carries space-form Status options, they simply go unused — Notion never auto-removes select options.

1.4.0 - 2026-08-07

Added

• --jobage-minutes on linkedin-search for sub-day freshness windows (#302) - LinkedIn filters its f_TPR parameter server-side at second granularity, so the CLI can now ask for postings from the last N minutes instead of whole-day windows only. Conflicts with --jobage are rejected explicitly (CONFLICTING_AGE_FLAGS). Useful for early-applicant freshness on high-volume searches; URL construction only, no parsing change.

• README: video walkthrough link in Quick start - The Next New Thing's hands-on walkthrough of the workflow (recorded August 2026), for newcomers who want to see the setup-to-application flow before reading. Docs only.

• Spec-pinning tests for the Language Gate's /rank contract (#278) - four regression guards in tests/test_rank_command.py pinning the language_gate/language_note fields through Steps 2-5 of /rank, including the Step 4 persistence rule that was live-debugged during #275 (vetoes reported in console output but language_gate: null on every persisted entry). Mirrors the existing gaps/strengths pinning pattern. No behavior change.

• The jobnet and jobdanmark CLIs identify themselves on every API request (#283) - their apiFetch/apiPost wrappers now send an explicit User-Agent (jobnet-cli/1.0, jobdanmark-cli/1.0) instead of Bun's anonymous default token, matching the honest self-identification jobindex already uses on htmlFetch. The new user-agent.test.ts suites assert the header on every request wrapper. No response behavior observed to change.

Changed

• The four Danish demo portals now ship disabled (#288) - jobindex-search, jobbank-search, jobdanmark-search, and jobnet-search default to enabled: false, and /setup's job-portals question now acts on the answer: it flips them to enabled: true when your market is Denmark, and leaves them off otherwise. Previously a non-Danish user's /scrape ran all four Danish boards by default, spending tokens fetching and filtering irrelevant listings. Fork heads-up: if you search the Danish market, set enabled: true in those four SKILL.md files after updating (or re-run /setup --section search); forks that already curated their portal set are unaffected.

Fixed

• The linkedin-search CLI identifies honestly - its User-Agent was a full Chrome browser string, the last portal CLI still spoofing after #283 and the jobbank/jobdanmark fix. It now sends Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; linkedin-search-cli/1.0), the same token format as every other portal. Verified live on both the search and detail endpoints: identical 200 responses with full content under the honest token.

• A .env was committable (.gitignore, tools/security_guards.py). /add-portal can generate a skill for a portal that only returns usable content through a paid fetching service, and such a skill reads an API token from the environment - but nothing stopped the .env holding that token from being committed. No shipped portal needs a credential, so upstream never hit this; a fork whose generated portals do hit it immediately. .env and .env.* are now ignored and pinned in REQUIRED_IGNORE_RULES, so the guard fails if the rule is ever dropped.

• The robots gate did not fail closed (tools/robots_check.py, #277). Found by an adversarial review run over the merged file, not by inspection. Both cases are pinned in tests/test_robots_check.py as FAIL-OPEN REGRESSIONs:

  • A soft 200 granted permission. A host answering /robots.txt with an HTML error page at status 200 produces a body that parses to zero rules, and zero rules read as "allowed" - so the browser-header retry ran on permission that was never given. A non-empty body carrying no recognised directive is now treated as unreadable. A genuinely empty file stays allow-all, per RFC 9309.
  • Disallow patterns were never percent-decoded while the request path was, so Disallow: /foo%20bar never matched /foo bar and the rule was silently skipped - a fail-open on any site that encodes its own rules.

• curl argument hardening (tools/robots_check.py). The curl argv had no -- terminator before the URL. gate() rebuilds the target as scheme://host/robots.txt before calling _fetch, so the gate path was never exposed; this is hardening for direct callers, with a test pinning the terminator, that a dash-leading argument fails closed end to end, and that gate() never passes a caller-supplied URL through to curl. --max-redirs 5 is set explicitly rather than left to curl's default.

• Negative and fractional filter flags are rejected in the Danish portal CLIs (#281) - --jobage (jobindex), --radius (jobnet), --category/--jobtitle-id (jobdanmark), and --company (jobbank) now validate as positive integers, completing the page/limit/ per-page tightening from #191. Some portals silently ignore invalid filter values and return unfiltered results, so a mistyped ID produced wrong results instead of an error.

• The upstream checker reports files missing from the upstream ref instead of a silent [OK] (#282) - if upstream renames or deletes a tracked framework file, a fork's check_upstream_updates.py now lists it under a [WARNING] summary instead of skipping it and printing a false all-clear.

• 09-web-research.md is now tracked by the upstream checker - the file shipped in #277 but was never added to FRAMEWORK_FILES, so forks got no signal when it changed.

• jobbank and jobdanmark CLIs identify honestly - jobbank's User-Agent was a full Chrome browser string and jobdanmark's detail command sent a bare Mozilla/5.0; both now use the Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; <portal>-cli/1.0) token the other portal CLIs use, matching the identification posture settled in #277. Verified live: both portals serve identical responses to the honest token.

• A WebFetch 403 is no longer treated as a dead posting - WebFetch sends a bot user agent, and many bank and corporate sites answer it with HTTP 403 while serving the same page to a browser normally. Every command read that as "page unavailable" and degraded silently instead of failing loudly: /rank marked live postings expired, /apply fell back to search-result snippets or to vague cover-letter prose, and /scrape stored listing-page #fragment URLs that fetch fine but return unrelated jobs, breaking every later run on that entry. New 09-web-research.md (framework_version 1.0.0) is 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 snippet is a lead rather than a source. Wired into /apply, /rank, /interview, /outcome, /notion-sync, the job-scraper skill, and writing-style rule 5 (03-writing-style.md 1.1.0 to 1.2.0).

  The retry is gated on robots.txt. WebFetch identifies itself as Claude-User and honors robots.txt, so a 403 means either a WAF default on a site whose published policy allows access, or a site that has actually declined. New tools/robots_check.py tells them apart and the escalation runs it before retrying: a disallow for * or Claude-User skips the retry entirely and goes straight to finding the employer's own posting. The rule is stated in the file 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 are pinned by tests/test_robots_check.py (15 offline cases): the WAF usually blocks robots.txt itself, so the policy is read as a browser when the honest request is refused and then obeyed strictly; and urllib.robotparser cannot be used, because it ends a record at a blank line and matches in file order, which reads a real-world policy as "everything allowed".

• /apply now records the application in the tracker - the flagship command 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 - and the safety net that would have caught it (/gmail-sync) refuses to create missing rows, so nothing detected the loss. A new 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; re-running /apply updates that row rather than duplicating it, unless every matching row holds a final status, in which case a second application to the same role gets its own row. The same step is mirrored into job-application-assistant because /scrape Step 5 routes straight into the skill (framework_version 1.2.0 -> 1.3.0), and /scrape Step 6 now defers to it instead of adding a row of its own. seen_jobs.json is deliberately left alone. Forks: the bump means check_upstream_updates.py will flag the skill - reconcile the new Step 3b (and Step 6b in apply.md) into your personalized copies rather than skipping the flag.

  drafted is introduced into the tracker status vocabulary, and every reader that meant submitted now says so. These readers define "open" 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 no longer drafts a chase email for an application that was never sent, /gmail-sync no longer reports unsent drafts as stale, /notion-sync leaves "Applied on" empty for them and says "not yet submitted" in the page body rather than calling drafts submitted documents, and /html-report gains a sixth Drafted bucket kept out of the funnel, the rejection rate and the headline count. /outcome Step 4 overwrites date with the submission date when a row leaves drafted, so the column keeps meaning "applied on".

  /gmail-sync deliberately keeps searching for drafted rows. /apply drafts but the user submits, and forgetting to run /outcome afterwards is the failure this issue is about. An employer reply arriving against a row still marked drafted is how that gets caught, so those rows stay in the search set, the application acknowledgement is promoted from noise to a drafted -> applied signal (it is the one email that proves a hand submission, and it arrives within a day of it), and an approved match corrects the date as well as the status. Only the staleness check skips them, since nothing was sent. (#269)

1.3.0 - 2026-08-03

Added

• Language Gate - no dimension or gate anywhere in the framework checked a posting's language requirements against what the candidate actually speaks (not a Scoring Dimension, not a /scrape//rank field, nothing for /apply's existing generic language detection to report to). Adds that check, structured like the existing Eligibility Gate, on a new structured Languages table in CLAUDE.md / 01-candidate-profile.md (/setup asks, or infers it from a CV/LinkedIn export): a posting requiring a language you haven't declared at all is a hard FAIL; one requiring a higher level than you declared in a language you do work in is FLAG, not an auto-reject, so borderline cases (a strict "fluent" bar vs. your own B1/B2) get your judgment instead of a silent drop; a requirement at or below your declared level is a clean PASS. Wired through /scrape, /rank, and /apply, with language_gate/language_note persisted into seen_jobs.json alongside the existing location veto so a re-read of the file (or a future debugging session) can recover why a job did or didn't make the shortlist.

Fixed

• CV date fields now use ASCII hyphens, so the PDF text layer extracts cleanly - the stock template wrote date ranges as [YYYY--YYYY], and on the repo's mandated lualatex toolchain the -- en-dash ligature extracts from the PDF as U+FFFD (�). The stock template therefore failed the ATS checklist's own "no � replacement characters" item on every date field, and did so silently: the rendered page looks correct, and no existing check inspected the extracted text. cv/main_example.tex now uses [YYYY-YYYY] and [YYYY-Present], and 05-cv-templates.md documents the failure mode and the check that catches it (framework_version 1.3.0 to 1.4.0). The two-page layout budget is unaffected.

  Fork reconciliation note. The five changed lines in cv/main_example.tex are the \cventry date fields - three under Professional Experience, two under Education - precisely the lines every fork personalizes. Rebasing forks should expect conflicts there, resolve them in favour of their own dates, and then apply the same -- to - change by hand. To find remaining instances across your own CV variants:

  grep -rn '\\cventry{[^}]*--' cv/
  

  Verify afterwards by extracting the text layer and checking the date lines specifically: pdftotext -layout <file>.pdf - | grep '�' - none of the hits may be a date field. (On the stock template two benign hits remain either way: the decorative separators on the contact and award lines, which are unrelated to dates and predate this fix.)

• tools/convert_salary_excel.py now parses localized numeric string cells - Excel exports that store numbers as text (a Danish "108,5", "1.234,5", or space-separated thousands) previously hit float()'s ValueError and were silently dropped from salary_data.json. The ambiguous single-comma-plus-three-digits pattern ("1,234", thousands in one locale and a decimal in another) is deliberately skipped rather than guessed, preserving the old safe behaviour for the one case that cannot be disambiguated. (#272)

• tools/check_upstream_updates.py compares the template-repo slug case-insensitively - GitHub serves repository paths case-insensitively, so a clone made from a lowercased URL was a legitimate direct clone that nonetheless triggered #265's fork-vs-self warning. (#273)

Changed

• SETUP.md section 8 now shows the first-time git remote add upstream ... command before telling you to git fetch upstream, which previously failed on any clone of a personal fork with no explanation of the missing remote. (#274)

Security & privacy

• The gitignore guard now covers every personal-output rule - security_guards.py additionally requires the ignore rules for Gmail sync state (gmail_sync/), generated dashboards (reports/), upskill reports (upskill/*.md), Notion sync state (**/job_scraper/notion_sync.json), pasted postings (documents/postings/**), scraper markdown output (**/job_scraper/*.md), and behavioral-report / LinkedIn-profile PDFs. With these, every .gitignore rule outside the guard's required list is build tooling noise, so any future weakening of the personal-data boundary fails CI. All rules were already present in .gitignore; the guard now enforces the full set. (#271)

1.2.0 - 2026-08-01

Added

• /rank now persists strengths and gaps into seen_jobs.json - Step 2's scoring agents already produced both arrays per job; Step 4 previously kept only rank_score, rank_verdict, and rank_date, so the honest per-posting findings were printed once in Step 5 and then discarded. Both arrays are now stored verbatim and replaced (never accumulated) on --all re-ranks, so downstream consumers of seen_jobs.json can read real triage findings instead of re-deriving them. See discussion #258.
• /upskill aggregate mode now ingests /rank's recorded gaps - previously it only read job_search_tracker.csv and guessed required skills from the role/sector/ notes columns, even though /rank had already fetched and scored postings that never made it into the tracker. Aggregate mode now also reads ranked entries (rank_score >= 45) from job_scraper/seen_jobs.json, dedupes them against tracker rows on case-insensitive company+role, and prefers a job's recorded gaps over an inferred skill list wherever both exist. The heatmap's Gap Source column now shows the recorded-vs-inferred split per skill, and the report header states how many jobs came from each source. Depends on #263 (/rank persisting gaps/strengths); see discussion #258.

Security & privacy

• SETUP.md no longer calls a fork "private working space" - forks of public GitHub repositories are always public, so that wording invited exactly the personal-data exposure it seemed to rule out. Section 8 now states the fork-is-public fact plainly and documents the safe alternative (a private repository with this repo as upstream), and /setup ends with a matching privacy note the moment profile data first lands in tracked files. Prompted by discussion #266.
• The gitignore guard now covers two more personal-data rules - security_guards.py requires cover_letters/Cover_*.* (the uppercase cover-letter naming variant /apply recognizes) and cv/*.txt (ATS text extractions of tailored CVs) in .gitignore, so a future change weakening either rule fails CI instead of silently making personal files trackable. Both rules were already present in .gitignore; only the guard lagged.

Fixed

• tools/check_upstream_updates.py no longer reports a false "up to date with upstream" when it silently falls back to a fork's own origin remote - the default state of a plain fork clone, where the script compared the fork against itself and could never detect upstream updates. It now warns that the fallback remote is not the template repo, shows the git remote add upstream command to fix it, and names the ref it actually compared against. (#265)
• Removed the vestigial cover_letters/OpenFonts/cover.cls - an unreferenced remnant of the original font bundle that, since #252's class rename, ambiguously declared the same cover class as the real cover_letters/cover.cls.
• Added regression tests pinning #252's ragged-row bounds fix in tools/convert_salary_excel.py (dimension-less workbooks read in read_only mode yield rows shorter than the header).

Changed

• CONTRIBUTING's "run what CI runs" list is now complete - it previously omitted tools/security_guards.py and the exact unittest invocation, the precise checks a contributor PR had already failed on. Prompted by issue #262.

1.1.0 - 2026-07-30

Security & privacy

• Personalized custom-template files are now gitignored regardless of engine - the ignore rules broadened from cv/main_*.tex to cv/main_*.* (and likewise for cover letters), so a fork using a Typst or other non-LaTeX template no longer commits personalized main_<company>.typ files to a public fork. The *_example.tex files stay tracked. If you registered a custom template before this release, check git status once after updating. (#238)
• Dependency review is live, for forks too - the repo's Dependency graph is now enabled, so the CI dependency-review job actually blocks PRs that introduce dependencies with known high-severity vulnerabilities, and the job is no longer gated to the upstream repo: forks get the same check, self-activating if the fork enables Dependency graph (it warns-and-passes otherwise). (#254)

Added

• freehire-search: full descriptions come back with the search - search now calls freehire's agent search endpoint (/api/v1/agent/jobs/search), which serves each hit's complete description instead of the search index's truncated preview. A 20-role search is one request rather than 1 + 20 detail calls, and /scrape's Step 2 no longer needs a per-hit fetch for this portal. --description-format markdown|text|html (default markdown) selects the rendering; table and plain output is unchanged. (#251)
• Custom templates: any compile-to-PDF toolchain (Typst, ...) - /add-template no longer hardcodes a lualatex/xelatex/pdflatex engine enum. Custom templates now declare a source extension and a full compile command, so Typst (typst compile) registers the same way a custom LaTeX template does. Stock CV/cover letter templates stay LaTeX, unchanged. (#238)
• Application-form fields as an optional third /apply artifact - when a posting's application form asks screening questions, /apply can now offer a prep sheet of grounded answers alongside the CV and cover letter. Opt-in; the default two-document output never changes. (#212)
• Confirmed facts write back to the profile - when /apply or /interview surfaces a fact the user confirms (a skill, a date, a project detail), it is written back to the profile files in the same turn instead of being lost with the conversation. (#211)
• CV methodology: in-progress qualifications and tenure-vs-output - 05-cv-templates.md gains explicit rules for stating in-progress certifications/degrees honestly and for checking claimed tenure against visible output (framework_version 1.2.1 -> 1.3.0). (#210)
• Scraper flags mass-posting and recycled-listing patterns - /scrape marks postings that look bulk-posted or recycled so they don't eat evaluation effort. (#207)
• Retry contract pinned in CI - all six portal CLIs now carry 429/5xx retry-backoff tests covering every fetch wrapper, so a silent regression in retry behavior trips CI. (#246)
• README: the extension model, documented - new Customization subsection "Extending the framework: portals, templates, criteria - and borrowing from other forks": the three extension points, the copy-one-folder pattern for borrowing a portal skill from another fork with a read-the-code-first checklist, and why there is deliberately no installer (the manual copy is the security model). Prompted by discussion #249.

Fixed

• /rank shortlist and below-threshold tables include each posting's URL. (#236)
• convert_salary_excel.py: count/index columns pair by category name instead of adjacency (#219), standalone count columns store as counts (#230), and ragged rows from dimension-less spreadsheets no longer crash with an IndexError (#252).
• cover.cls: duplicate package imports removed and the \ProvidesClass name fixed to match the filename, silencing a class-name-mismatch warning. (#252)
• Portal CLI type-checking pinned to concrete @types/bun / @bunli/* versions to stop environmental CI type-drift. (#226)
• freehire-search points at freehire.me after the service's domain migration. (#229)
• verify_pdf.py's missing-poppler error now includes per-OS install hints. (#252)

1.0.0 - 2026-07-22

First tagged release. This marks the framework as stable and gives forks a described checkpoint to update against instead of a moving master. It is a baseline of what already exists rather than a set of new changes; subsequent releases will document what changed since the previous tag.

At this baseline the framework provides:

• Application workflow - a drafter/reviewer /apply pipeline (CV + cover letter), plus /setup, /scrape, /rank, /interview, /outcome, /upskill, /expand, /html-report, /gmail-sync, /notion-sync, /add-portal, /add-template, and /reset.
• Portal search skills - country-agnostic job-board CLIs (LinkedIn, freehire, and the Danish boards) in the portable Agent Skills format under .agents/skills/, discovered and orchestrated by /scrape, with an enabled: toggle for skipping portals.
• Framework versioning - framework_version markers on methodology files plus tools/check_framework_version.py (CI guard) and tools/check_upstream_updates.py (fork-side update preview).
• Privacy and safety guards - .gitignore protection for personal data, the tools/security_guards.py allowlist for .gitignore negations, and a CI policy of making no live portal requests.
• Cross-runtime support - a root AGENTS.md pointer so Codex and Antigravity can discover the portable portal skills, with Claude Code as the reference runtime.