career-forge

Working name. Rename it when the idea is firm.

Status: a skeleton and nothing else. There is a development environment, an empty app that can sign an Account up and log it back in, a queue and a worker, and no feature of any kind. See getting started to run it. The design is being worked out one decision at a time on the issue tracker, and every decision that survives is written down in docs/adr/. The words the project uses are fixed in CONTEXT.md.

The problem

Every resume tool on the market is a template and a paywall. Point one at a job ad and it will happily write that you led a team of twelve, because nothing in it knows whether you did. Lying is the default failure mode.

The fix is boring and it is the whole product: keep an evidence base, and refuse to write a line that does not come out of it.

What it does

A person feeds the app old resumes, portfolio exports and past applications. Nothing happens. The app sits on them.

Naming a job starts the work. A cheap first pass warns the person if the job is a long stretch, then lets them decide. If they carry on, the app interviews them, digging into the projects it already knows about to find evidence that answers what the job actually asked for. Their answers are kept in their own words and never overwritten.

Out come a tailored resume and a cover letter, where every line about ability cites a stored evidence record. Gaps are named honestly rather than papered over, because the alternative is getting caught in the interview. The application is frozen and kept, so months later the person can read back exactly what they sent. If they get called in, a third document is generated on demand.

How it is meant to run

One command. docker compose up, on a laptop or a small server, no account with anybody.

Bring your own AI key: Anthropic, OpenAI or Google Gemini, with Ollama supported as best effort. Roughly two cents to thirty-four cents per application, paid to the model provider, not to me.

Accounts exist from day one. The same code runs one person on a laptop and a family on a server, and each Account's data is walled off from every other by the database itself.

The code is free and open. If a hosted version ever exists, that is what gets paid for.

Where the design is up to

The stack, the domain model, the AI provider layer, job ad intake and the account lifecycle are all settled and written up as ADRs. Everything still open is a ticket on the tracker, hanging off the map issue.

Two rules that will not move:

• Every generated line about ability traces back to a stored evidence record, checked on the server after the model has spoken. An unbacked line is rejected and turned into an interview question.
• The repo is public and seeded with fabricated data only. No real personal data ever lands here.

Getting started

You need Docker, Node 22 or later, and pnpm. corepack enable gets you the right pnpm.

git clone https://github.com/BohnBawerick/career-forge.git
cd career-forge
cp .env.example .env

Open .env and replace the four placeholder values: POSTGRES_PASSWORD, GOTRUE_DB_PASSWORD, GOTRUE_JWT_SECRET and DATABASE_URL. DATABASE_URL writes the Postgres password out a second time, so put the same password in both or the migrations cannot connect.

Both passwords end up inside a connection URL, so keep them to letters, digits, - and _, or percent-encode them. A character such as @, /, # or ? splits the URL somewhere else and GoTrue or the migrations then fail without naming the password. Generate each one with:

openssl rand -hex 24

The JWT secret does not go into a URL. It has to be at least 32 characters, and one secret is shared between career-forge and GoTrue, so generate it once:

openssl rand -base64 48

Then start the two containers the development environment is made of, install, and migrate:

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d
pnpm install
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000. Nobody has claimed the install yet, so the first address and password you enter become the Owner, and sign-up then closes. The address is a login name: nothing is ever sent to it. pnpm seed claims an unclaimed install from the command line instead, with a fabricated Account, and refuses once someone has claimed it.

The queue consumer is its own command. In one shell:

pnpm worker

and in another:

pnpm queue:ping "anything you like"

If port 5432 or 3000 is already taken on your machine, set POSTGRES_PORT in .env and pass --port to pnpm dev. DATABASE_URL carries the Postgres port too, so change it there as well. The same goes for GoTrue: if 9999 is taken, change GOTRUE_PORT and change the port in GOTRUE_URL to match, or every auth call reaches a dead port.

Your data lives in two places: the Postgres volume and the storage folder named by STORAGE_FILESYSTEM_ROOT. A backup is a database dump and a copy of that folder.

The commands

Command	What it does
pnpm dev	The app, on port 3000
pnpm worker	The pg-boss consumer
pnpm queue:ping	Puts one test job on the queue
pnpm db:generate	Writes a migration from the schema
pnpm db:migrate	Applies migrations
pnpm db:check-auth	Proves career-forge can read the schema GoTrue owns
pnpm seed	Creates a fabricated Owner
pnpm lint	ESLint, including the rule below
pnpm typecheck	vue-tsc over every directory
pnpm test	Vitest
pnpm test:e2e	Playwright, starting its own dev server
pnpm build	A production build
pnpm preview	Serves the production build locally

Where the code goes

One package, no workspace. These directories are the seams; if one of them ever has to become a package, it becomes one without moving (ADR 0004).

Directory	Holds
app/	The Vue side of the Nuxt app
server/	Nitro server routes, which are the HTTP API
core/	The domain rules
db/	Drizzle schema, migrations, and GoTrue's auth schema declared read-only
queue/	The only module that talks to pg-boss
worker/	The pg-boss consumer
storage/	Sources and Documents on disk, behind a switch for S3
seed/	Fabricated data
tests/	Vitest
e2e/	Playwright

server/ and worker/ both import core/. core/ imports neither, and pnpm lint fails if it ever does.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright (C) 2026 BohnBawerick.

Run it, fork it, change it, all free. If you run a modified copy as a service for other people, publish your changes. Running it for yourself or your household triggers nothing. Why AGPL and not MIT.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.