Should I vibe code
Track job applications, contacts, tasks, documents, and tailored materials in one workspace
$40 a month for a board with four columns. The only sensitive thing in it is the fact that you're leaving.
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Their verdict, the Pro price and the build-time estimate come from their entry, MIT-licensed. Checked 2026-08-04.
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Our verdict, the regret score and everything below it. Editorial and unsponsored — nobody can pay to be moved.
The honest answer
why the verdict is what it is
There is no clever part. A job tracker is applications in columns, a contact or two hanging off each one, and a date you sort by; an agent will hand you a working version before the kettle boils, and for the two months you are actually applying that is genuinely enough. What you will not rebuild is the browser extension that fills in Workday and the keyword matcher that reads a job description against your resume — the two pieces of the $40 that are honestly worth money, and also the two that break every time a job board ships a redesign. The one thing worth a minute's thought is what the database holds: not applications so much as the fact that you are leaving, who you spoke to, what they offered, and five slightly different accounts of your own career. Keep it on your machine, or behind your own login on hardware your current employer does not administer, and this is one of the safest builds on the site.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- Job-board parsing, continuously. LinkedIn, Indeed and the big ATS vendors all actively discourage automated extraction, and the scraper that worked in July returns an empty div in September
- The autofill extension, which is not one feature but a per-site maintenance treadmill and the most expensive thing in the product to keep alive
- Where you hosted it, if that turned out to be a work laptop or a company cloud account — a salary expectation in an employer-administered document store is a bad afternoon
- Resume version drift: five tailored variants, four filenames, and no record of which one the recruiter actually has in front of her
- PDF metadata, which carries the document title, the producer and sometimes the author straight into the recruiter's inbox — "resume_final_bigcorp_v7" says more than you meant it to
- Nothing else. Worst case you go back to the spreadsheet you were already keeping.
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- The only person in it is you, and it runs on hardware you own
- You paste job details in rather than scraping them out
- You want fields Huntr does not have — visa status, agency name, the recruiter who ghosted you twice
- You are happy for it to be dead in three months, which is roughly how long a job search lasts
- It lives on infrastructure your current employer administers or can subpoena
- You are building mass auto-apply, which is how a name gets filtered out at the ATS rather than in
- You are storing job-site passwords rather than pasting listings by hand
- It is a shared tool for a careers service or a bootcamp, because then it holds a cohort's private job searches and stops being your own notebook
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Run it locally or behind a login on infrastructure you personally control. This is the whole risk model of the entry in one sentence.
- Prefer paste over scrape. A textarea you drop a job description into never breaks, never gets rate-limited, and never gets your IP blocked from a site you are trying to be hired through.
- If you do write an extension, keep it to reading what is already on screen in a tab you opened, with no background crawling and no stored credentials for job sites.
- Do not build auto-apply. Volume submission is visible to every ATS on the receiving end and the cost lands on your name, not your code.
- Strip metadata from generated PDFs and give exported files a boring, consistent name. The recruiter can read the properties pane.
- Keep resumes as structured data with a version per application, so you can always answer "which one did they get" from the record rather than from memory.
- Export to CSV on a schedule. This app is deliberately temporary and the contact list is the part worth keeping.
I am building a personal job-application tracker: a board of applications,
contacts, notes, tasks and resume versions. One user — me — and it will be
obsolete in three months. Constrain it accordingly and challenge me if I drift.
1. Local first. Runs on my machine or on a host I control, with one account and
no signup flow. If you propose anything multi-tenant, stop and ask why.
2. Before features, tell me plainly what this database contains: that I am job
hunting, who I have spoken to, salary numbers and interview notes. Put that
paragraph in the README so future me remembers where not to deploy it.
3. Build the export first: applications, contacts and notes as CSV, resumes as
files. This tool is temporary and the contact list is the part that is not.
4. Job details go in by paste, into a textarea. Do not write a scraper for
LinkedIn, Indeed or any ATS, and if I ask for one, tell me it breaks on their
next redesign and can get my address blocked from a site I want a job from.
5. If I insist on a browser extension, it may only read the page already open in
front of me. No background crawling, no stored job-site credentials, no
automatic form submission anywhere.
6. Refuse to build auto-apply. Say once, clearly, that bulk submission is
visible on the receiving side and the cost lands on my name.
7. Resume variants are versioned records tied to the application they were sent
with, so I can always answer which document a given recruiter holds.
8. Strip metadata from generated PDFs — title, author, producer — and name
exported files consistently and boringly.
9. If you add AI tailoring, the key stays server-side, one request per explicit
click, and the job description is the only thing sent. No background calls.
10. Out of scope on purpose: interview scheduling, salary benchmarking, anything
that emails a recruiter on my behalf. Point out that Huntr is $40/month and
the honest comparison is renting it for the two months I am actually
searching, not owning it forever.That one keeps you out of trouble. For the prompt that actually builds it, canivibecodeit.com has one.
their build prompt ↗Or don’t build it
the boring option, and the way back out
For the eight weeks you are genuinely applying, the autofill and the keyword matching are worth $40 a month and the quarterly plan drops it to $30 — rent it, then cancel. What is not worth $480 a year is a kanban board with your own name in it, and that is what remains once the search is over. Building the tracker and renting the extension for two months is a completely legitimate answer.
The tool is disposable by design; the contact list is not. Export applications, companies, contacts and notes as CSV on a schedule, and keep resumes as files rather than rows. When the search ends, delete the app and keep the spreadsheet — in two years the only thing you will want is the name of the recruiter who was good to you.
Active open-source resume builder with structured data and PDF export.
Questions
Why not just use a spreadsheet?
Most people should, and most people do. The reason to build the app is the parts a spreadsheet is bad at: a resume version attached to the application it was sent with, reminders that fire, and a status column that cannot be typed inconsistently. If you are not going to add those, the spreadsheet already wins.
Can I scrape job boards to fill it automatically?
Technically yes and practically no. The big boards fight extraction, the markup changes without notice, and the failure mode is that your address stops being served by a site you are hoping will forward your application. A paste box is one line of code and never has a bad week.
Is any of this data actually sensitive?
Not in a regulatory sense — it is your own information about your own search. It is sensitive in a career sense, which is a different thing and more immediate. The realistic bad outcome is not a breach; it is deploying this to a work account and having your interview notes sit in infrastructure your manager administers.
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
New verdicts, the worst thing that landed in the trap, and the occasional incident report. No other email, ever.
last reviewed 2026-08-04 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice