career-ops-hq/career-ops

The open-source AI job search agent.

English | Español | Deutsch | Français | Português (Brasil) | 한국어 | 日本語 | 简体中文 | 繁體中文 | Українська | Русский | Polski | Dansk | தமிழ் | العربية | हिन्दी | Türkçe | Tiếng Việt | Bahasa Indonesia

  Created by @santifer, with    700+ contributors

Months of sending CVs into silence.
So I built the filter I needed.

740 listings evaluated. 68 applied. 12 interviews. 1 offer.
I was its first user. I got the job. Then I open-⁠sourced it.

Paste a job. On your machine, it tells you if it's still open and if it fits.
It tailors your CV and drafts your answers. You press Submit.

_{My own search, partway through, with the UI in Spanish.}

Companies use AI to filter candidates.
I just gave candidates AI to choose companies.

Six months later, I left that job.
Now we build career-ops, so you can land yours.

Try it on one job ↓ · Read the full story →

_{Prefer not to use a terminal? Join the waitlist for a web version →}

The people who came after me wrote down how they got hired.

_{Every card is a public issue you can open. Landed yours? Leave your card →}

⭐ If career-ops helped you, a star helps the next person find it.

Your turn

Paste one job you were about to apply to tonight. If it comes back do not apply, you just got the night back. If it comes back with a plan, you know what to do next.

npx @santifer/career-ops init

_{Open source. Local. In the AI CLI you already use. Free and local models included.}

You don't have to search alone

The silence after you hit send is not about you. Enough people saw the same thing to write the practice down, in six lines:

Apply better to fewer. Signal over volume. Evidence over keywords. A human decides. Local-first. Dignity on both sides of the table.

A few of them, in their own words.

_{Every signature is a commit you can audit. Read them all, or add yours → · What is AI job search?}

Hiring will not fix itself. The people going through it can, and they are already in the room, comparing notes and fixing each other's setups.

This is where the fix gets written. A room, not a club. Let's build together.

Sponsors

career-ops is free for candidates, forever. These companies sponsor the project:

SerpApi · Build a portfolio project with live search data. SerpApi gives developers structured JSON/Markdown from Google Search, Maps, Shopping, and other engines through a simple API call.

Sponsorship buys clearly labeled visibility, never influence: no amount of money changes the roadmap or places anything in the product. Sponsors never appear in evaluations, rankings or recommendations.

What career-ops does for you

Paste a job. It tells you whether that night is worth it.

• Still open? It checks that the posting is still live before you write a word.
• Not you? It scores the role against your real CV and tells you to skip a weak fit. You can override it.
• Worth it? It drafts the CV, the cover letter and the answers. You read them. You send them.
• Who do I talk to? It finds the person and drafts the note. It never sends it.
• Where does it all go? Every application stays on your machine. Nothing is uploaded to us.
• What should I learn? After a run of noes, it names the gap.

On first launch it asks for all that in chat. Nothing to configure by hand.

What career-ops will not do

• Auto-submit an application. It drafts the answer to every field; you review and click Submit. The script never POSTs (prepare-application.mjs).
• Send an email. Drafts only. There is no mail transport anywhere in this codebase.
• Phone home. No telemetry, no backend of ours. Your CV goes from your machine to the AI provider you chose, and nowhere else. The only public ledger is this repo: HIRED.md and its issues.
• Push you to apply below 4.0/5. It will tell you not to. You can override it, and it will say so.

Features

| Feature | Description | | ------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | A-H Evaluation | Role summary, CV match (with how much each requirement matters for this posting, and whether that weight came from the JD's own wording, its structure, or an estimate, labelled per requirement; an estimate can never be top-band), level strategy, comp research, personalization, interview prep (STAR+R) -- plus a Block G posting-legitimacy check (is it still open, is it a repost: observations, not verdicts), and a Work-Auth signal that flags an explicit no-sponsorship JD as a hard blocker | | Human-in-the-Loop | AI evaluates and recommends, you decide and act. The system never submits an application -- you always have the final call | | ATS PDF Generation | ATS-readable CVs tailored to each JD from your own experience, in Space Grotesk + DM Sans design | | Cover Letter Generator | Research-backed cover letters with keyword mirroring, four interactive angle prompts (why/problems/approach/tone), draft-in-chat approval gate, and A4 PDF via the same HTML + Playwright pipeline as CVs. Auto-drafts on every evaluation; complete and generate on demand via /career-ops cover | | Beyond the CV | Company research (deep) surfaces AI strategy, recent moves, engineering culture, and the angle your profile should take. Contact discovery (contacto) identifies the hiring manager, recruiter, or team peer worth reaching out to and drafts a ≤300-character LinkedIn message tuned to each contact type. Formal application email drafts (email) turn an evaluated report or pasted JD into a subject line, body, and attachment checklist without sending, submitting, or clicking anything. Applications get you in the queue; research gets you a conversation. | | Pattern Analysis | Rejection patterns and per-ATS-channel advance rates (analyze-patterns.mjs), lifetime funnel stats (stats.mjs), repost detection, a possible sign of a ghost job (detect-reposts.mjs) |

How It Works

Quick Start

Fastest way, one command:

npx @santifer/career-ops init

💡 npx ships with Node.js: it runs the installer once,

without installing anything globally. No Node yet? Install it first.

(Already using a Claude Code / Codex CLI? Then you already have it.)

This clones the latest release into ./career-ops and installs dependencies. Then:

cd career-ops
claude   # or codex / qwen / opencode / agy / grok — open your AI CLI here

On first launch, career-ops walks you through setup (your CV, profile and target roles) just by chatting. Nothing to edit by hand.

git clone https://github.com/career-ops-hq/career-ops.git
cd career-ops && npm install
npx playwright install chromium   # only needed for PDF generation
On a non-Debian/Ubuntu Linux distro (Fedora, Arch, ...), Chromium's system
libraries aren't installed by the line above — install them yourself with
your distro's package manager if PDF generation fails to launch the browser
(Playwright's own docs list the required libraries per platform).
2. Open your AI CLI in this directory. On first launch it walks you
through setup (your CV, profile and target roles) by chatting
claude   # or codex / opencode / qwen / agy / grok
Then ask your CLI to adapt the system to you:
"Change the archetypes to backend engineering roles"
"Translate the modes to English"
"Add these 5 companies to portals.yml"
"Update my profile with this CV I'm pasting"
3. Start using
Paste a job URL or JD text to trigger auto-pipeline.
Every other mode, and how to ask for it in your CLI: see Usage below.

Global install

npm i -g @santifer/career-ops

This installs the career-ops binary globally, so you can run career-ops init [folder] without npx. init is its only command: it sets up a workspace, and everything after that happens inside your AI coding CLI (see Usage below), not through this binary.

Which one should you use?

• npx @santifer/career-ops init: best for first use; creates a dedicated project folder.
• npm i -g @santifer/career-ops: if you'd rather type career-ops init than the npx form. It adds no other commands.

Other ways to run it

• From any folder, as a Claude Code plugin: docs/CLAUDE_PLUGIN.md.
• Without an AI CLI: standalone Gemini, Ollama and OpenAI-compatible scripts evaluate a JD on their own. See docs/SCRIPTS.md.

The system is designed to be customized by your AI coding CLI itself. Modes, archetypes, scoring weights, negotiation scripts -- just ask it to change them. It reads the same files it uses, so it knows exactly what to edit.

See docs/SETUP.md for the full setup guide (including scanning through an outbound proxy), docs/SUPPORTED_CLIS.md for how to run career-ops in each supported CLI, and its headless command where it has one, docs/RUNNING_ON_A_BUDGET.md for instructions on running career-ops cheaply using custom or local models (and docs/FREE_TIER.md for running it at zero cost on Antigravity CLI's free tier), docs/AUTOMATION.md for scheduling recurring scans and a zero-token triage-to-shortlist recipe, docs/KEEPING_PORTALS_LIVE.md for keeping your company list current, docs/BACKUP_STRATEGIES.md for backing up your CV, tracker and reports, docs/APPLY_AUTOFILL.md for details on the ATS auto-fill flow, docs/LINKEDIN_JOIN.md for cross-referencing a LinkedIn connections export against the companies in your funnel, and docs/FAQ.md for answers to common setup questions, including how story provenance prevents invented numbers. Design principles live in ARCHITECTURE.md; runtime flows in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Usage

Paste a job URL or description into your AI CLI. career-ops checks that a linked posting is still live (pasted text has no link to check), scores it against your CV, writes a report, tailors your CV (a PDF by default) and adds a row to your tracker. That covers most days. Everything else is a mode you ask for by name. If a posting can't be read, the pipeline stops and asks you to paste the text or share a screenshot.

Asking for a mode

| CLI | How you ask for scan | | --- | --- | | Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI (agy), Grok Build CLI | /career-ops scan | | Pi | /skill:career-ops scan | | Codex, Qwen, Cursor, or any other supported CLI | Plain language: "Run the career-ops scan mode" |

/career-ops with nothing after it shows the command menu in the CLIs that use it. Plain language works in every supported CLI. As a Claude Code plugin, the command is /career-ops:career-ops.

All of them share one router, .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md, and the same modes/*.md files, so every CLI routes a request the same way (browser-heavy modes also need Playwright tools). Slash commands are not guaranteed in Codex: ask in plain language, or run one prompt headless with codex exec "Evaluate this JD with career-ops auto-pipeline: https://company.com/jobs/123" (docs/CODEX.md). How to run it in each supported CLI, headless commands where a CLI has one, and per-CLI setup notes are in docs/SUPPORTED_CLIS.md.

The everyday commands

| Command | What it does | | --- | --- | | paste a URL or JD | Full pipeline: liveness check (URLs only), A-G evaluation plus H at high scores, report, tailored CV (PDF by default), tracker row | | scan | Scan your portals for new postings and add them to the inbox (data/pipeline.md) | | pipeline | Work through the URLs waiting in the inbox (the standard and premium tiers may skip obvious mismatches) | | apply | Fill an application form with you, field by field. It stops before Submit | | tracker | Where every application stands | | followup | Which applications are due a follow-up, with drafts |