Hintglass
Guides · Last updated
Build your Hintglass profile
Hintglass, a macOS menu-bar app, answers from your profile, a folder of short files about you and the job, which you can generate from your resume (CV) and the job posting in Settings → New profile from files.
What you have done comes only from your profile; search answers also use the web, and code answers read your screen. Hintglass never claims experience your profile doesn’t hold.
Generate it from your resume and the job posting
- Check that your connection has passed its Test in Settings → Connection. Generate uses it. Until it has, the section says “Generate uses your connection, which hasn’t passed a Test with these settings.”
- In New profile from files, click Choose… beside Your resume and pick your resume. PDF, Word (.docx), RTF, HTML, Markdown or plain text. The line below shows the file’s name and how many characters were read.
- Click Choose… beside Job posting and pick the job posting.
- Type a Name for the profile. It can’t be the name of a profile you already have.
- Click Generate. A line names each file as it is written. Cancel stops it, and nothing is saved.
- Read the files it wrote. Settings says the profile was created and selected, and Reveal in Finder opens its folder.
Hintglass reads both files on your Mac and sends their text once to your connection’s host, billed to your account like any answer; their file names are not sent. It writes five files:
- cv.md: your experience, from the resume alone. It ends with a section headed “Not shown in the CV”, which lists what the posting asks for that your resume doesn’t show. Remove any you have done.
- role.md: the job posting, cleaned up but not summarised away.
- company.md: what the posting says about the company, the team and the people you may meet.
- stories.md: up to five stories from your resume, each in situation, task, action, result order.
- domain.md: one-line reminders of the methods, rules and tools named in the posting and your resume.
cv.md and stories.md are written in your resume’s language, the other three in the posting’s. Hintglass writes only what your resume states, and leaves out contact details, salary and references. Read the files through once before your interview: every answer about you comes from them.
If the reply is cut off, or the host takes too long, nothing is saved; generate again, or use a shorter resume or posting.
Write it yourself
- In Settings → Profile, click Reveal in Finder. The first launch creates a profile named default, in
~/Library/Application Support/Hintglass/profiles/default/, with an empty cv.md and an example of each file beside it. - Fill in cv.md, the one file a profile needs. Write what you have done, with dates and numbers, and what you haven’t, such as “No Kafka”: that line lets the model answer honestly instead of inventing.
- Add role.md, company.md, stories.md and domain.md if you want them. The example files say what goes in each.
PREP-PROMPT.md, in the same folder, is a prompt for a chat with an AI assistant: paste it there with your resume and the posting, and it asks you questions before it drafts the five files. Hintglass never changes a profile’s files; it only reads them.
Choose and check a profile
- Profile in Settings → Profile lists every profile folder that has a cv.md. The one selected is used at your next session start.
- Status reads “Ready” when the profile loads; otherwise it says what to fix, such as a cv.md that is still empty.
- Hintglass reads cv.md, role.md, company.md, stories.md and domain.md, plus tech.md from earlier versions. Any other file in the folder is ignored.
- Changes to the profile, or edits to its files, apply the next time you start a session.