feat(letters): job → company → standard resolution, picker, and customize-from

[Samhit21]

Closes #767. Part of #765, and the consumer of the lattice #766 stored — both merged, so this branches straight off main.

The resolution chain

src/lib/letters/resolve-letter.ts (new) — pure, no React, no storage access:

resolveLetterForJob(job, letters) → { letter, scope } | undefined

Job → company → standard, first hit wins. The scope is not decoration: every surface below needs it to tell the user why they're looking at this text. Three properties beyond the happy path, each with its own test:

• A blank company skips the company rung rather than matching an empty key — deriveCompanyKey answers undefined for "", " " and " , ".
• A letter naming another job is never inherited, even at the same employer. A both-keyed record is refused by the contract but the store doesn't enforce it, and one that got in names a specific posting — matching it on its company key alone would show job B the letter written for job A.
• Specificity beats recency. The rungs are ordered, not scored: a standard letter updated today does not outrank a company letter written last month.

The row glyph is unchanged

A standard letter existing must not flip every row to "has letter" — that would claim a letter the user never wrote for that employer, and the reveal would then show text they didn't intend for it. The glyph still counts the job's own letters only, asserted directly.

Inheritance surfaces inside the dialogs, where there's room to name it:

• Reveal — the inherited letter is one more entry, always last, never what opens by default. Selecting it names the scope ("This is your standard letter, not a letter for this job") and swaps Edit for Customize for this job. Edit is gone, not joined: editing in place would rewrite a letter this job doesn't own.
• Editor — a "Start from…" picker while composing, absent while revising, never seeding on its own.

Customize-from is a copy, permanently

The editor carries no id from its starting point, so saveLetter inserts rather than upserting over the source. That's the whole model — a live link would mean editing job B's letter rewrote the standard letter already submitted for job A, and for prose there's no merge that makes that safe (#765; it's why letters ship before résumés). The dialog says so at the moment of copying, because "Started from your Northwind letter" alone reads as a link.

One nuance worth flagging: "Customize for this job" does seed on open, via a separate seed prop. That isn't a loophole in "never seeds automatically" — the pick happened, one dialog earlier. A plain "Write a cover letter" click still opens empty however many offers exist, and that's tested.

Reuse

Per the issue's analysis — extended LetterEditorDialog (now authors all three scopes via optional jobId/companyKey), LetterRevealDialog, and JobLetterIndicator. One new component: StandardLetterButton, because no existing surface owns a panel-level (not per-row) letter affordance, and folding it into JobTracker would push a file already past the ~200 LOC guideline further past it. No new design-system primitive.

Company letters get no separate entry point, deliberately: one is created by customizing from a job row, where the company is already known. A panel-level version would need a company picker for an app that has no company entity.

Acceptance criteria

All eleven met, each with a direct assertion:

• Own letter wins over company + standard, scope job
• No own letter → company letter, scope company
• Only a standard letter available → scope standard
• Empty company never matches a company letter
• Row glyph reflects the job's own letters only — asserted on the aria-label
• Reveal names the scope when inherited, says nothing extra when it's the job's own
• Customize writes a new record with a new id and this job's jobId; no id reaches saveLetter
• Editing a customized letter leaves company/standard untouched (the absent id is the mechanism)
• Standard-letter button opens the editor with no jobId and saves with neither key
• "Start from…" never seeds without a pick, absent while revising
• Pre-existing JobLetterIndicator.test.tsx passes untouched — I added a new describe and changed no existing test

Verification

npm run verify green — 384 test files, 6395 tests passed, 10 skipped, build clean, fallow audit --base origin/main exit 0.

Two notes:

• Test-harness extraction. Fallow flagged my new suite re-deriving click/typeBody from LetterEditorDialog.test.tsx. Extracted both into __test-utils__/dialog-dom.ts as clickButtonIn/typeIntoTextArea and pointed both suites at them. The typeIntoTextArea docblock records why the native-setter dance is needed, since a plain .value = is swallowed by React's value tracker and fails silently.
• Stale note corrected. Letter scope keys: optional jobId + companyKey (cover-letter contract v2) #766 left a comment in storage/index.ts predicting this change would add lettersForCompany/standardLetters/deriveCompanyKey to the barrel. It didn't, and the comment now says why rather than sitting stale: the two readers still have no caller (every surface goes through useJobLetters, which reads the store once), and deriveCompanyKey's new caller reaches the zero-dep leaf directly rather than pulling backup.ts + resumes.ts into the letters chunk.

Residual fallow duplication is warn-level and mostly inherited (the beforeEach shape shared across five hook suites); the gate passes.

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View logs

[rohithgollapalli]

Verdict: REQUEST_CHANGES — 2 Blocking, 2 Secondary, 3 Nits. The chain, the copy model, and the glyph invariant are all right and well tested; both blockers are about what the new surfaces reach past.

Gates run: typecheck OK, lint OK, build OK, fallow audit --base origin/main exit 0 (dead code 0, complexity 0, duplication warn-only), targeted suites 67/67 OK, full suite 6391 passed / 4 failed — all four in src/lib/jd-extract/schema-org*.test.ts, all Intl thousands-grouping under an en-IN machine locale ('USD 1,50,000' vs 'USD 150,000'), untouched by this diff and not attributable to it. Fixture-PII gate skipped: no fixture binaries in the diff.

AC checklist for #767: 11 of 11 met, each with a direct assertion. Verified by reading the tests, not the checkboxes.

Blocking

1. An inherited letter reaches the screen without the egress acknowledgement. JobLetterIndicator.open() computes mustWarn from hasOutsideProducer(letters) — this job's own letters — but the diff adds two routes that render an inherited letter's body, and neither consults its producer:

• Reveal, then the inherited chip: selected.body renders (LetterRevealDialog.tsx:194).
• Editor, then startFromLetter: copies option.letter.body into the visible textarea (LetterEditorDialog.tsx:194).

Failure, concretely: standard letter carries producer: { contract: 1, producer: "claude-code-letter-skill" }; the ack has never been recorded (fresh browser, or private mode — letter-egress-ack.ts fails silent to always ask again). Job row has one hand-typed letter, no producer. Click the glyph, mustWarn === false, reveal opens, click "Your standard letter" — outside-produced text on screen, warning never shown. The second path is worse: a job with no own letters takes open()'s early return straight to the editor, which never consults the ack at all, so one click on the picker chip puts the same text in the textarea.

JobLetterIndicator.test.tsx:9 states the contract this breaks: "the egress acknowledgement gates exactly [a letter an outside producer wrote]". That is now false for a letter reached by inheritance.

Fix — gate on everything the indicator can surface, keeping the fresh-read discipline the letter-egress-ack.ts docblock insists on:

function open() {
  const outside =
    hasOutsideProducer(letters) ||
    (inherited !== undefined && inherited.letter.producer !== undefined);
  if (outside && !hasAcknowledgedLetterEgress()) {
    setStage("ack");
    return;
  }
  reveal();
}

function reveal() {
  if (!hasLetters) {
    setEditing(undefined);
    setSeed(undefined);
    setStage("edit");
    return;
  }
  setStage("reveal");
}

function acknowledge() {
  recordLetterEgressAcknowledged();
  reveal();
}

Plus a test per path: a producer-bearing inherited letter alongside a clean own letter, and a producer-bearing inherited letter with no own letters at all.

2. The description and a code docblock both claim a company-letter entry point that does not exist. The body says "Company letters get no separate entry point, deliberately: one is created by customizing from a job row, where the company is already known." Nothing in the tree does that. Grep for companyKey reaching LetterEditorDialog:

src/components/features/LetterEditorDialog.test.tsx:208:        companyKey="northwind"

— the test file, and nothing else. The reveal offers only Customize for this job (LetterRevealDialog.tsx:215), which composes with jobId. So a user cannot create a company letter at all, and TITLES.company, STORAGE_LINE.company, and scopeOf's company branch are unreachable in the shipped bundle. The scope: "company" rung of the chain can only ever fire for a record written by an outside producer or restored from a backup — a third of the feature named in the PR title has no write path.

That #767's own step 5 says the same thing is where this came from, but its step 4 specifies only "Customize for this job", so the issue is internally inconsistent and this PR resolved it silently in the narrower direction. The same claim is repeated as a code comment at StandardLetterButton.tsx:23-26, where it outlives the PR page and reads as a description of a shipped path.

Either resolution is fine, but pick one before merge — Closes #767 means nothing reopens it:

• Add the affordance: a second button in the reveal, Customize for this company, passing deriveCompanyKey(job.company) and no jobId, shown when the key is defined. LetterEditorDialog already handles the scope end to end.
• Or amend the body and the StandardLetterButton docblock to say the company tier is read-only in this change, and file the follow-up now.

Secondary

3. Re-clicking the picker silently discards typed work. startFromLetter (LetterEditorDialog.tsx:193) does an unconditional setBody(option.letter.body), and the picker stays mounted after a pick — offers is gated on letter === undefined, not on whether a seed already happened, so it also renders in the Customize-for-this-job flow where seededFrom is already set on open. A user who customizes, writes 500 words, and mis-clicks the still-present "Your standard letter" ghost button loses all of it: the textarea value is replaced, and a controlled <textarea> has no undo across a React re-render. Either hide the picker once seededFrom !== undefined, or confirm before overwriting a body that differs from the source.

4. inheritedFor re-scans the whole letter set for every row on every render. JobTracker.tsx:391 calls it inside the row .map(), and resolveLetterForJob walks allLetters up to three times per call, with no memo anywhere on the path. Every keystroke in an EditableField and every status-filter toggle re-runs the whole thing — O(jobs x letters x 3). A useMemo over [jobs, allLetters] producing a Map<string, InheritedLetter> is a one-line change and keeps inheritedFor exactly as written.

Nits — non-blocking

5. open()'s !hasLetters early return is the one route into the editor that does not setSeed(undefined); onEdit and onCompose both do. Unreachable today (a seed can only be set from the reveal, which only opens when hasLetters), so this is about not leaving the invariant to an argument. The fix in finding 1 covers it.

6. LetterRevealDialog passes the source through — onCustomize?.(selected) — but JobLetterIndicator's handler ignores the argument and reaches for startFrom[0]. Same record today; taking the argument keeps it true if a second inherited entry is ever offered.

7. capitalize() uppercases only the first character of the caller's phrase, so a company the user typed lowercase renders as "Your northwind letter" in the picker chip. Cosmetic, and the alternative (title-casing free text) is worse — worth a line in the docblock saying the phrase is echoed as typed.

Description accuracy (gate 3f)

Accurate on the chain, the glyph invariant, the copy model, and the seed-on-open nuance — the "one nuance worth flagging" paragraph is exactly the kind of self-disclosure that makes a body worth reading. One overclaim (finding 2). The verification line checks out apart from the four locale-dependent jd-extract failures noted above, which are not this PR's.

No fixes were pushed and the branch was not collapsed: the auto-fix path requires 0 Blocking findings. The branch already holds exactly one commit, so the one-commit invariant is intact. No suggestion blocks — every non-blocking finding here is behavioural, and a behavioural change applied by a one-click button is a change nobody reviewed.

Reviewed at a8369016fad2b61c36de3d354635b593a8ac1d51.

---

Reviewed by: Claude Opus 5 (high)

[rohithgollapalli]

Blocking (1/2) — the egress acknowledgement does not cover what this exposes.

This is where an inherited letter enters the component's surfaces, but open() below still computes mustWarn from hasOutsideProducer(letters) — this job's own letters only. Two new paths render an inherited letter's body without ever reading its producer:

• reveal, then the inherited chip: LetterRevealDialog.tsx:194
• editor, then startFromLetter: LetterEditorDialog.tsx:194

Standard letter with producer: { contract: 1, producer: "claude-code-letter-skill" }, ack never recorded (fresh browser, or private mode — letter-egress-ack.ts fails silent to always ask again), job row with one hand-typed letter: mustWarn === false, reveal opens, one click on "Your standard letter" puts outside-produced text on screen with no warning. A job with no own letters is worse — open() returns early to the editor, which never consults the ack at all.

JobLetterIndicator.test.tsx:9 says the ack "gates exactly" a letter an outside producer wrote. That is now false for an inherited one. Fix in the review body — it also picks up nit 5 (this early return is the one editor route that doesn't clear seed).

[Samhit21]

Fixed in 9a87260. Confirmed the bug exactly as described — both paths, and the no-own-letters one is indeed the worse of the two.

open() now gates on everything the component can surface:

const exposesOutsideProducer =
  hasOutsideProducer(letters) || inherited?.letter.producer !== undefined;
if (exposesOutsideProducer && !hasAcknowledgedLetterEgress()) {
  setStage("ack");
  return;
}
reveal();

Took your open/reveal/acknowledge split as suggested — the ack path hard-coding "reveal" was the second half of the bug, correct only while the empty case could never warn, and sharing reveal() makes the post-warning destination structurally identical to the no-warning one. That also picks up nit 5: compose now goes through one openEditor(scope, from?) helper that always clears editing and sets the seed and scope together, so the early return can't skip a reset.

Three tests, and I mutation-tested them rather than trusting they bite — reverting just the || inherited?.letter.producer !== undefined clause fails exactly the two that should:

× warns before revealing, when only the INHERITED letter came from outside
× warns before the EDITOR too, when the job has no letters of its own

Plus the negative direction (hand-typed own + hand-typed inherited must NOT warn), since the whole point of the gate is that it doesn't tell the user something untrue about their own typing.

[rohithgollapalli]

Blocking (2/2) — this describes a path that does not exist.

Nothing in the tree creates a company letter. companyKey reaches LetterEditorDialog from exactly one place:

src/components/features/LetterEditorDialog.test.tsx:208:        companyKey="northwind"

The reveal offers only Customize for this job (LetterRevealDialog.tsx:215), which composes with jobId. So TITLES.company, STORAGE_LINE.company and scopeOf's company branch are unreachable in the shipped bundle, and scope: "company" can only fire for a record an outside producer wrote or a backup restored.

The PR body repeats the claim, and #767's own step 5 is where it came from — but step 4 specifies only "Customize for this job", so the issue is internally inconsistent and this resolved it silently in the narrower direction. A comment is the worse of the two places to leave it: it outlives the PR page.

Either add the affordance (a second reveal button passing deriveCompanyKey(job.company) and no jobId — the editor already handles the scope end to end), or amend this docblock and the body to say the company tier is read-only here, and file the follow-up now. Closes #767 means nothing reopens it.

[Samhit21]

Fixed in 9a87260 — took the first option and added the affordance, so this docblock now describes something real.

You were right that the claim was mine to check and I hadn't. LetterRevealDialog gains a companyOffer, rendered as "Customize for this company" whenever the job has a derived key. JobLetterIndicator takes a companyKey prop, tracks a composeScope, and passes exactly one scope key to the editor:

jobId={composeScope === "company" ? undefined : jobId}
companyKey={composeScope === "company" ? companyKey : undefined}

One deviation from your sketch, and I think it's the better shape: the offer is not limited to the inherited entry. It's available for the job's own drafts too, because "I wrote this for one posting and want it for every job at this employer" is how a company letter actually comes to exist — restricting it to inherited letters would mean you could only create a company letter if you already had a standard one to descend from.

deriveCompanyKey(job.company) is computed in JobTracker and threaded down, so a job with a blank company simply has no key and gets no offer — which matches the chain's own rule about never matching a blank key.

Three tests: the offer appears with a key, is absent without one, and opens the editor titled "Write a company letter" with the source body seeded and no jobId.

[rohithgollapalli]

Secondary — this re-scans every letter for every row on every render.

resolveLetterForJob walks allLetters up to three times per call, and this sits inside the row .map() with no memo on the path. Every keystroke in an EditableField and every status-filter toggle re-runs the whole thing: O(jobs x letters x 3).

A useMemo over [jobs, allLetters] producing a Map<string, InheritedLetter> fixes it without touching inheritedFor, which is well factored as written.

[Samhit21]

Fixed in 9a87260. inheritedFor is untouched, exactly as you suggested — the memo wraps it:

const inheritedByJobId = useMemo(() => {
  const byId = new Map<string, InheritedLetter>();
  if (!allLetters || allLetters.length === 0) return byId;
  for (const job of jobs) {
    const resolved = inheritedFor(job, allLetters);
    if (resolved) byId.set(job.id, resolved);
  }
  return byId;
}, [jobs, allLetters]);

Row lookup is inheritedByJobId.get(job.id). Deps hand-audited both directions per CLAUDE.md's note that exhaustive-deps isn't enforced here: jobs and allLetters are the only values read, inheritedFor is module-scope, and both come from hooks that hand back a new array only on an actual store change — so this recomputes on a letter or job change and not on an EditableField keystroke.

[rohithgollapalli]

Nit — the source is passed here, but JobLetterIndicator's handler ignores the argument and reaches for startFrom[0] instead. Same record today; taking source keeps this correct if a second inherited entry is ever offered.

[Samhit21]

Fixed in 9a87260 — the handler now takes source and uses it:

onCustomize={(source) =>
  openEditor("job", { letter: source, label: labelFor(source) })
}

Needed a labelFor(source) helper alongside it, since the copy notice names what it copied from and the answer now depends on which record came through: the inherited entry has a scope phrase, one of the job's own drafts has only its user-set label. That fell out of the company-offer work too, where the source really can be a different record from startFrom[0] — so this stopped being hypothetical in the same commit.

[rohithgollapalli]

Nit — only the first character is uppercased, so a company the user typed lowercase renders as "Your northwind letter" on the picker chip. The alternative (title-casing free text) is worse, so this is probably the right call — worth one line in the docblock saying the phrase is echoed as the user typed it.

[Samhit21]

Fixed in 9a87260 — kept the behaviour, documented the reasoning:

ONLY the first character, deliberately: the phrase embeds a company name the user typed, echoed exactly as they typed it, so a lowercase "northwind" renders as "Your northwind letter". Title-casing free text is the worse option — it would mangle "eBay", "iRobot" and every deliberately-lowercase brand, and a name the user can see is theirs beats one this app restyled.

[Samhit21]

Fix-up pushed — 9a87260

All seven findings addressed. Both blockers were real bugs, and the second one was an overclaim I wrote without checking — thanks for grepping it rather than taking the body's word.

#	Severity	Resolution
1	Blocking	Egress gate now covers the inherited letter; open/reveal/acknowledge split as suggested
2	Blocking	Added the affordance — "Customize for this company" is now the company tier's write path
3	Secondary	Picker retires once a seed is taken
4	Secondary	useMemo over [jobs, allLetters] → Map<string, InheritedLetter>
5	Nit	Covered by 1's restructure — one openEditor(scope, from?) sets all three pieces of compose state
6	Nit	Handler takes source; needed a labelFor helper, which stopped being hypothetical once 2 landed
7	Nit	Behaviour kept, reasoning documented (title-casing free text mangles "eBay"/"iRobot")

On finding 2 — I took the "add it" branch, with one deviation. Your sketch scoped the new button to the inherited entry; I made it available for the job's own drafts too. Restricting it to inherited letters would mean a company letter is only creatable if you already have a standard one to descend from, and "I wrote this for one posting and want it for every job at this employer" is the path that actually produces one. TITLES.company, STORAGE_LINE.company and scopeOf's company branch are all live in the shipped bundle now, and scope: "company" can fire for a user-authored record.

On finding 1 — I mutation-tested rather than assuming the new tests bite. Reverting only the || inherited?.letter.producer !== undefined clause fails exactly the two cases it should:

× warns before revealing, when only the INHERITED letter came from outside
× warns before the EDITOR too, when the job has no letters of its own

The negative direction is covered too — a hand-typed own letter plus a hand-typed inherited one must not warn, since the gate's whole purpose is not telling the user something untrue about their own typing.

Verification. npm run verify green end to end: 384 test files, 6404 passed (9 new), 10 skipped, build clean, fallow dead code 0 · complexity 0 · duplication warn-only, exit 0. Your four jd-extract/schema-org*.test.ts failures do not reproduce here — consistent with your en-IN locale diagnosis.

Still one commit; the branch was amended, not appended. Re-requesting review.