Boulot

Hiring is run by AI now. Boulot is the one on your side: a free, open-source career system that learns everything you've done and makes you the candidate the bots can't screen out. Runs on your own laptop.

Boulot — French slang for "work", "the job", "the daily grind". Free and open source, because the market's hard enough without another subscription.

What it is · Why it's different · How to use it · Run it · Get in touch

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The problem

The job-search tools everyone uses optimise for one thing: volume.

• Auto-apply bots fire 200 generic applications a day. Reply rates have collapsed because of them, and LinkedIn now throttles the accounts that use them.
• AI recruiter agents hand you a daily list of often-stale matches. Their incentive is to place you somewhere in their network, not to make you the strongest candidate for the job you want.
• Trackers and autofill organise the chaos, but the AI layer is a bolt-on: one-shot, generic, keyword-stuffed text that the latest applicant-tracking systems now actively penalise.

All of them share two things: they treat applications as a numbers game, and they keep your career data on their servers.

Boulot is the opposite bet. Fewer applications, each one much better. Your data stays yours.

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What it is

Boulot is a complete career-ops system that runs on your own computer through Claude Code. There's no website to log into. It's a set of plain files and AI instructions in a folder you own.

You talk to it in plain English. It:

• Tailors your CV to each role, pulling from a master record of everything you've ever done, then rewording and reordering it so the whole thing reads like it was written for that one job. It never invents experience.
• Argues over your CV before you send it. Three AI agents with opposing jobs (a Hiring Manager, a Reviewer, and a Strategist) pressure-test every claim and disagree on purpose. You get the version that survived the fight.
• Researches the company before you apply or interview: recent news, funding, who you'd report to, any red flags.
• Drafts cover letters and application answers that say something only true about that company, framed through your experience.
• Grills you for the interview. A friendly interviewer, a hostile one, and a gap-analyst run a tough mock and tell you exactly where you're bluffing.
• Tracks every application and tells you what to do next.

What matters is the craft that goes into each one.

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Why it's different

	Auto-apply bots	AI recruiter agents	Trackers + autofill	Boulot
Optimises for	Volume	Matches in their network	Organisation	The quality of each application
Your CV is	One static PDF, sprayed	A profile in their database	Scored by a bolt-on	Rebuilt and argued over per role
Interview prep	None	Light	Light	Adversarial mock interviews
Your data lives	Their cloud	Their cloud	Their cloud	On your machine
Cost	Monthly subscription	Free, but their incentive ≠ yours	Monthly subscription	Free & open source
Gets you in front of people	Sprays applications	Warm intros (their strength)	No	Researches & surfaces target roles; you decide where to aim

What Boulot won't do: it won't fire off 200 applications while you sleep, and it can't get you a warm introduction to a hiring manager the way a recruiter network can. It does the part they're bad at: taking everything you've done and turning it into an application a bot can't screen past.

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How to use it

First time? Open the folder in Claude Code and type /start. Boulot interviews you one question at a time and writes your profile and master CV from your answers (paste an old CV or your LinkedIn to go faster). That's the only setup.

After that, you just talk to it:

• "Read my profile and tell me which roles I should go for."
• "I want to apply for Head of Operations at Acme. Here's the link."
• "Tailor my CV for it." → the three agents argue, you get the sharpened version.
• "Make me a PDF."
• "Research the company before my interview."
• "Grill me for the interview, be tough."
• "What's the status of all my applications?"

There are shortcuts for the big jobs:

Command	What it does
/start	First-time setup: interviews you and builds your profile + master CV
/new-job	Start tracking a role you want to apply for
/apply	Full application in one go: research + tailored CV + cover letter + tracking
/cv	Tailor your CV to a role (the three agents argue over it)
/pdf	Turn a tailored CV into a clean PDF
/research	Deep-dive a company before you apply or interview
/prep	Tough interview prep: likely questions, your best answers, your weak spots
/status	Every active application at a glance
/archive	File a finished application and capture what you learned

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Two ways to run it

Boulot runs on your own computer either way. Nothing is hosted, there is no account, and your files stay in a folder you own.

The app (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/ElliotJLT/boulot-os.git
cd boulot-os
pnpm install
pnpm start

It opens at http://localhost:4319. First run asks your name, then asks you to paste your current CV, and turns it into your record: every role, every achievement, tagged so it can pick the right ones per job. Then paste a job link and it writes the CV, the cover letter and the PDF.

Your files land in ~/Boulot, as plain markdown you can open in anything.

You need Node 20+ and pnpm. pnpm desktop builds a Mac app if you want one. A signed download is on the roadmap.

Through Claude Code

The original way, and still the most flexible if you already live in a terminal. The same skills the app uses are a Claude Code plugin.

1. Get a Claude account. Sign up at claude.com (a paid plan, Pro or Max, for it to do real work).
2. Install Claude Code. Follow the install guide. There's a desktop app (no terminal needed) and a command-line version.
3. Download Boulot. Click the green Code → Download ZIP button at the top of this page and unzip it. (Or git clone https://github.com/ElliotJLT/boulot-os.git boulot.)
4. Set yourself up. Open the boulot folder in Claude Code and type /start. Boulot interviews you and writes your profile and master CV from your answers.
5. Apply for your first role. Paste a job link and say "tailor my CV for this."

The AI itself will walk you through anything that trips you up.

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What's in the box

• USER/ — everything about you and your applications (active roles, pipeline, archive, reusable interview stories, reference CVs). Blank templates live in USER/_template/; /start copies them into USER/ on first run, and everything you write there is gitignored.
• shared/ — interview frameworks (STAR method, question bank, salary negotiation) and templates, plus an optional script to build a searchable database of target companies from a CSV you provide.
• .claude/ — the system's brain: the AI agents, commands, and rules.
• CLAUDE.md — the master instructions the AI reads every time.

Your real applications and personal data never leave your machine. The file you edit is never the file git is watching: templates are tracked, your filled-in copies are not, so you can fork this repo and push it without publishing your phone number.

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How it's built

Boulot is an agent-native application. No server, no database, no web app to log into. The whole system is three things:

• Markdown for the AI's brain — its instructions, its agents, its commands (.claude/). You can read every rule it follows.
• Your files as the state (USER/) — master CV, applications, notes. Plain text you own and can edit by hand.
• A few small scripts for the mechanical bits, like turning a finished CV into a PDF with a browser you already have.

That's the shape agent frameworks are settling on: a persona in markdown, tools in code, state on disk. Vercel's Eve, Claude Code's skills, the model providers' own agent SDKs are all versions of it. The difference is what sits on top. Those are frameworks for building agents; Boulot is a finished product built with the pattern, aimed at one job — getting a real person hired.

One rule holds the whole thing together: the AI only ever rearranges what's true about you. It selects and reorders bullets from a master record you control. It never invents a role, a number, or a skill it can't trace back to something you told it.

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Get in touch

I built Boulot for my own job hunt, in a brutal market, because the tools I tried treated me as a list of spam to send. It worked, so I open-sourced it and made it free. It's entirely my own work, and mine to give away.

If you want to use it, want a hand setting it up, or want to talk about building AI that's actually on people's side:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hireelliot

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_{Boulot runs locally through Claude Code. It never sends your data anywhere except to the AI you choose to power it.}