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You do not need to know a tool’s name. But knowing the shape of a request that works saves a round trip, and a few of these do something you would not think to ask for.

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Getting set up

Who am I connected as?
Add this to my work laptop — I use Cursor there.
Kill the connection I pasted in a chat by mistake.

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Filling in Me

I worked at Vertex from March 2021 to last month as a senior platform engineer. Here’s everything I remember — file it.
Add this to the Vertex role: we finished the Stripe migration a week early and nobody had to work a weekend.
Mine the Vertex role into highlights.
Make a standing rule: I contributed to the payments migration, I didn’t lead it. Never describe me as having led it.
Use the photo on my GitHub profile.
“Add this to the Vertex role” is the phrasing that gets an append rather than an overwrite. If you say “update the Vertex role”, a careful assistant will still append — but the first phrasing removes the ambiguity.

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Resumes

Here’s a posting — tailor my resume to it and tell me what I can’t evidence.
Run a gap report on this posting first. I’m not sure it’s worth applying.
Make a copy of my base resume for the Helios application and cut it to one page.
Show me that resume as text — does it fit on a page?
Publish my Stripe resume and give me the link.
Withdraw the link on the old Helios resume.
Export my Stripe resume.

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The pipeline

Here’s a job — track it. https://boards.greenhouse.io/…
I applied to Helios yesterday for the staff engineer role. Here’s the posting: …
Helios moved me to the final round.
Close out everything I never heard back from — they’re all ghosted.
I just had a call with the Helios recruiter. Team is six people, they want someone to own billing end to end. Log it.
What do I need to chase this week?
What does next week look like?
Draft the follow-ups for anything overdue, using what was actually said on each one.
Save this cut as “Gone quiet”.
Give me a read-only link to my pipeline for my coach.
How’s my search going?
What’s actually going wrong with my search?
Run my weekly review.
Which of my resumes is getting responses?
“What’s actually going wrong” is the one worth remembering. It reaches diagnose_search, which names the step of the funnel that is losing people instead of handing back counts.

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Companies and people

Research Helios and put it on their record.
Who do I know at Stripe?
Which companies have I researched but never applied to?
Sarah at Helios — ping me about her in two weeks.
Get me ready for my system design round at Helios.
Which fintech companies in London have I never applied to?
Which of my contacts have no email on file?
Anything that reads as a list can be acted on as one, and asking for the whole set at once is better than naming them one at a time:
Tag all of those as fintech.
Ping everyone I haven’t spoken to in a month, two weeks from now.
Send me my companies as a spreadsheet — just the ones I’ve applied to.
“Tag all of those as fintech” adds a label. “Set their tags to fintech” replaces every label they have. The first phrasing is almost always the one you meant.

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Deleting, and getting it back

Delete the Acme application, I’m not going for it.
What’s in my archive?
Put Stripe back.
Empty the archive.
Deleting a company, a person or an application archives it — it leaves every list and count immediately, and waits thirty days before it goes for good. Emptying the archive and deleting from inside it are the only two acts that cannot be undone, and a good assistant will read the archive back to you before running either.Everything else — a role, a highlight, a note, a resume, a task, a tag — is gone when you delete it.

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Filing the week

Here’s what happened this week: shipped the billing migration, reconciliation is down to 20 minutes. Call with the Helios recruiter — team of six, they want someone to own billing. Told Priya I’d send her my resume by Friday.
That single paragraph becomes a background append, a highlight, a timeline entry, and a task with a due date. It is the highest-value sentence in this page.

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Running an instance

Admin only.
Is email set up? Configure Resend with this key and send a test.
Invite priya@example.com and write me the message to send her.
Is anything broken on this instance?
Did that invite to priya@example.com actually send?
Who asked for access this week?
Who changed the Resend key?

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When it gets something wrong

Say so plainly. The tools are designed to be corrected:
No — that number isn’t confirmed. Take it off and make it a standing rule.
You overwrote my Helios research. Can you tell what was there before?
The second one is worth knowing the answer to: no, it cannot. The archive above catches a deleted record, not an overwritten field — the notes are simply the new text now. That is why the read-first rule exists and why append_role_background is the default for new material. Install the hired skill and the whole class of problem mostly goes away.