Rolester

Find, vet, and advance the right roles.

Rolester is a job-search workspace that runs on your own machine. You tell it what you're actually looking for. It reads real job postings and tells you which ones are worth your time, writes applications from things you've genuinely done, drafts your recruiter replies, preps you for interviews, and keeps track of where everything stands.

No account, no server, no telemetry. Rolester never phones home, and your files stay on your machine. The one thing that goes out is whatever your AI CLI sends to its own provider to do the work — same as any other task you'd give it. See privacy for the details.

Why it's different

Most job tools match keywords, then spray. Rolester won't write a single line of a cover letter until it has read the whole posting and checked it against what you said you want — your comp floor, your location, your dealbreakers. Jobs that don't clear that bar, it tells you to skip.

And it won't lie for you. Every claim in a tailored résumé traces back to something you told it about your own work. If you didn't do it, it doesn't get written.

Getting started

You'll need:

• Node.js 18 or newer — check with node -v
• An AI coding CLI, either one:
  • Claude Code — npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code (claude.com/claude-code)
  • Codex — npm install -g @openai/codex (github.com/openai/codex)

Then:

npm install -g rolester
rolester start claude    # or: rolester start codex

That sets up your workspace, opens the dashboard at http://localhost:7777, and hands you off to the agent. From there you just talk to it.

Your first hour

1. Let it onboard you. It asks a handful of questions and builds your profile from the answers: what roles you want, what you'll accept, what you won't, and the real work you've done. If you'd rather kick the tires first, say "set me up with a quick sample profile."
2. Paste a job posting — a description copied from anywhere, a link, or the sample in examples/sample-jobs/ — and say "evaluate this." You'll get a verdict: keep it or cut it, how well it fits, whether the money works, and what to do next. All from an actual read of the posting.
3. Say "write a résumé and cover letter for this." It builds them from your own evidence and refuses to invent anything.
4. Paste a recruiter email and say "draft a reply." It writes the reply and remembers the thread.
5. Open http://localhost:7777 and watch the job appear, move through your funnel, and pick up history. The dashboard is read-only on purpose — the agent does the work, the dashboard shows it.

One first-run thing that looks broken but isn't: before you've onboarded, rolester doctor will report that your setup is incomplete and list candidate/*.yml files to create. That's expected. Onboarding fills them in.

What it does

• Onboarding — a conversation, not a form. Produces your targets, comp floor, evidence bank, honesty boundaries, and writing style.
• Finding jobs — builds searches from your targets, finds boards and company career pages worth watching, dedupes, drops dead links, and triages what's new.
• Vetting jobs — reads the full posting and judges it against your actual constraints before anything gets written.
• Honest applications — résumés, cover letters, and short answers built only from your evidence bank, with a check that blocks anything half-finished.
• Applying — fills portal forms for you, defaults to letting you hit submit, pauses at CAPTCHAs.
• Recruiter comms — drafts replies, follow-ups, scheduling, and negotiation, and keeps the whole thread.
• Interview prep — packets tailored to who you're talking to, a story bank grounded in your real work, and live coaching for comp conversations.
• Outcome tracking — records what happened, notices when your results say your strategy needs a rethink, and tells you.
• Research — company intel and comp benchmarks, kept firmly separate from your résumé claims so web findings can never launder into fake credentials.
• Dashboard — stat cards, funnel, active pipeline from sourced through offer, per-job detail, follow-up reminders, and table / board / calendar views. Tokyo Night and Gruvbox themes, light or dark.
• Memory — lessons from each application compound, so it gets sharper the longer you use it.

Same skills for anyone. A nurse, an engineer, and a driver each answer onboarding their own way and get the same loop.

Everyday commands

rolester next       # the one thing worth doing next
rolester doctor     # check your setup is healthy
rolester update     # pull the latest code; your data is untouched

The dashboard comes up with rolester start. To run it on its own:

rolester tracker        # write a static snapshot to workspace/tracker.html
rolester tracker-dev    # serve http://localhost:7777 with live reload

Useful flags on start: --no-agent (workspace + dashboard only), --no-dashboard, --agent <name> (any CLI on your PATH, e.g. cursor), --port <n> (default 7777).

How it works

Rolester is an agent runtime. The CLI sets up the workspace and serves the dashboard, but the job-search work happens inside your agent, reading a set of skills that tell it how each step is done. That's why you talk to it in plain language instead of memorizing subcommands, and why it works with whichever AI CLI you already have.

The rule underneath all of it: no tailoring, no applying, until the job has passed a real read of the posting. Titles and keywords are triage, not truth.

More

• Docs — setup, guides, and reference
• Architecture and AGENTS.md — how the skills and the agent contract fit together
• Roadmap · Sources strategy

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/CodesWhat/rolester
cd rolester
npm install
npm link
rolester start claude

MIT licensed.