The CareerOps Manifesto: What It Is and Why I Signed as #86

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I signed the CareerOps Manifesto today, signatory #86. Thirty seconds, a GitHub discussion, a merge, and my username became a public commit in the career-ops repository. The manifesto is a short public statement about how job hunting should work, and the project is a free tool that puts AI on your side of the table. My certificate is the proof.

  1. The whole thing fits in one line: “Companies use AI to filter candidates. We gave candidates AI to choose companies.” Companies already screen you with software. This exists so you get the same power back.

  2. career-ops (github.com/santifer/career-ops) is free and open source. You run it through an AI assistant you already use, like Claude Code or OpenCode. It scans job boards, scores each posting against your experience, drafts a tailored resume per listing, and tracks every application in one place. The creator’s numbers: 740+ listings evaluated, 100+ personalized CVs, one Head of Applied AI role landed.

  3. The practice has six rules:

  1. Apply better to fewer. Ten applications you believe in beat two hundred you don’t.
  2. Signal over volume. The goal is not to be seen more. It is to be seen clearly.
  3. Evidence over keywords. Every claim traces back to something true. Reformulate, never fabricate. An AI that lies for you is not on your side.
  4. A human decides. Nothing is ever auto-submitted. The tool prepares; the person chooses.
  5. Local-first. Your search is nobody’s dataset.
  6. Dignity on both sides of the table. Recruiters’ time deserves respect. So does yours.
  1. Then the nine rights, quoted exactly. They bind whoever builds these tools, the project included:
  1. You are invisible by default.
  2. No one proposes you without your yes.
  3. Your yes is human. Always. It cannot be delegated to an agent.
  4. You never pay. The moment a job seeker has to pay, the practice is broken.
  5. Whoever searches shows themselves first. A company sees who you are only after you saw who they are.
  6. Your data is yours: portable, exportable, deletable.
  7. You can leave at any moment, completely.
  8. Your agent works for you. Not for a platform, not for an employer.
  9. You will know when a machine decides. If a system rejects you, you have the right to know it was a system.

  1. The line that made me sign: “The question was never whether both sides will have agents. The question is whose side your agent is on.”

  2. You might expect an AI job tool to be a spam machine. This one is the opposite. It says so itself: “This is NOT a spray-and-pray tool.” It recommends against applying to anything scoring below 4.0/5, and “Volume was the old way. Automating the old way just makes noise faster.”

  3. You might also think a signature is a PR gesture. It’s not. It’s a commit in the repository, append-only and tied to your GitHub account, and the badge only renders for real signatures.

  4. I enjoy job hunting as a modular, programmable process, and this fits. You don’t need an expensive setup either: even OpenCode and OpenRouter models perform decently in this system. My hope is readers get real value out of it too.

The takeaway: Read the manifesto. If it reads like how you want to be treated, sign it: thirty seconds, and your name becomes a real commit. Then try the tool with the AI assistant you already have.

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