Phase 2A: make CareerOS genuinely usable

[abdo2006-dev]

Why the previous MVP failed real-use acceptance

The MVP required manual local setup and sign-in, did not make a local owner session available by default, and left discovery dependent on a separate ingestion command. The result could appear empty even when the implementation itself was sound, and its development-first pages did not provide a coherent daily workflow.

Personal Mode and one-command startup

• npm run personal checks Docker, starts the local Supabase runtime, applies pending migrations non-destructively, configures local app and ingestion environment files, ensures a stable local owner, runs Greenhouse ingestion, and starts Vite plus a loopback-only refresh companion.
• Personal Mode silently establishes the local owner session and redirects /sign-in into the application. Public authentication remains intact when Personal Mode is disabled.
• The local owner identity and password are generated locally, persisted only in ignored local runtime files, and reused across restarts; the browser never receives a service-role key.

Refresh, UI, and data preservation

• Discovery exposes refresh state, last-refresh time, result counts, and resilient loading, empty, filter-empty, and failure states.
• Rebuilt application shell, dashboard, discovery cards/filters/detail workspace, applications and interview workspace, manual entry, and profile foundation for responsive desktop and mobile use.
• Normal startup uses supabase migration up --local only: it never calls supabase db reset and preserves local opportunities, saved items, applications, notes, profile data, and snapshots.

Demonstration and QA

• Real local Greenhouse run: 140 checked / 140 created; after a complete launcher restart, 140 checked / 140 unchanged, confirming repeat startup does not duplicate or clear existing data.
• Visual QA covered the dashboard, populated and empty discovery states, opportunity detail, applications, manual entry, profile, and responsive desktop/mobile layouts.
• Frontend suite: 96 tests passing. Ingestion suite: 38 tests passing with synthetic local HTTP fixtures only.

Deferred

ECE relevance ranking, personalized competitiveness or acceptance probability, additional adapters, cross-source deduplication, resume parsing, cloud deployment, public authentication rollout, admin roles, multi-user hardening, and AI interview generation remain intentionally out of scope.