Use cases / Job search

Tracking a job search

A job search is the canonical Intabula problem: many things of one kind (postings), facts to compare across them (salary, status, dates), and prose that won't fit in a cell (the posting itself, your cover letter). Here's what running it in Intabula looks like.

1. Ask the agent to build it

"Find open roles that fit me and set up a tracker." The agent searches the web and creates a Jobs collection: one Markdown record per posting, with the details in the body and the source link preserved. From the data, it infers the columns — status as a select, applied as a date, company as a wikilink relation to a Companies collection, salary as text — and saves a Kanban board grouped by status to your sidebar.

2. Documents inside the rows

Ask for a tailored cover letter for each role and the agent writes one inside each record, drawing on that specific posting. Because the output lands in structure, reviewing it is a glance at a table instead of scrolling a chat transcript.

3. Live in it

• Update status as replies land — from the iOS app, wherever you are.
• Ask the agent to re-check whether postings are still open; closed ones show up in the status column.
• Add a referral column later and ask the agent to backfill it across every record — each edit byte-exact and logged with a before/after diff.

Why not a spreadsheet, notes app, or chat

A spreadsheet cell can't hold a cover letter. A notes folder can't be sorted by status. A chat produces the research and then forgets it. Intabula keeps rows, documents, and upkeep in one place — and it's all plain Markdown files you keep afterwards.

The same mechanics work for an apartment hunt, a vendor comparison, a reading pile, or bug triage — only the columns change.