Every meaningful change to the studio, newest first. Including the ones you cannot see: when the tools change how they write, that is listed here too, because a returning user deserves to know why this week's draft reads differently from last week's.
Ariadne writes your letter without a job posting in front of it, so it never had a company to address or a date to carry. It was still labelled Cover letter, which is the kind of thing you only discover is wrong at the moment you are about to send it.
It is called Your letter, to adapt now, and it is built to be adapted. Three things to fill in per application: the date, who it goes to, and what you want to talk about. Fill in the recipient and the greeting addresses itself. Everything else is written, and the one paragraph that is an example rather than reusable now says so, so you know which part to swap and which parts to keep.
You can type into those three slots on the screen and what you typed comes out in the download. Leave them and they arrive as the usual square brackets, which is the only thing a Word file or a PDF can do to say fill this in.
The letter also got its frame back. It had been arriving with no greeting and no sign-off, which read as unfinished rather than as reusable.
The best lines in a positioned resume are usually joins: you said one thing telling one story and something related telling another, and the sentence is what those two become together. Ariadne could only ever show one source per line, so those lines, the most worked ones in the document, were the ones whose card came up empty.
A line now shows every piece of your own words behind it, up to three, each labelled with the story you were telling at the time. Put your words back and it asks which version you meant rather than guessing.
The heading changed with it. It used to say you wrote, which was only true when the source was your old resume. Most of the time it is something you said in conversation, so it says you told me, and it counts: you told me, twice.
When Asterion had a question about something in your Education, Skills, Certifications or Awards, say it wanted the year on a degree, the question appeared in the margin but nothing was marked on the page. Clicking it took you nowhere, and Rewrite this line did nothing, because there was no line attached.
Those questions now sit on the entry they are about, the same as everywhere else in the document: tinted, numbered, and you can jump straight to them.
Changes that really are about a whole section, reordering your skills, dropping a certification, no longer pretend to be about a line. They appear as one quiet note under that section's name in the margin. Nothing to click, nothing to resolve, but still said out loud.
The resume on screen was set in a different typeface from the one in the file, and more loosely spaced, so the document you read and the document you sent looked like two different documents. The spacing was the worse half: it made the page look about a third longer than it prints, which is the one thing a resume is judged on at a glance.
Both now use the same typeface and the same spacing as the download, so the preview is a preview.
Ariadne read your name off the resume you gave it. If that resume put your name and your email address on the same line, which is what usually happens when a PDF is read back into text, the name was thrown away and the document started with your email address instead.
It affected every way of taking the resume out: the PDF, Copy as text, and Copy for Google Docs. The screen looked fine, because your name is in the page around the document. Only the file was wrong.
Your name, email and phone are now read once when you hand over your resume and kept with the document itself, so every download says the same thing. If any of it came through wrong, it is yours to correct.
Download .docx sits next to Save as PDF now. It is the format most people expect a resume to arrive in, and the only one a recruiter can edit without converting it first.
It is a real resume, not a text dump: US Letter, half inch margins, your name at the top, section headings with a rule under them, and the dates for each role aligned down the right hand edge so the page scans as a timeline. Metrics stay bold and your links stay clickable.
Compressing the distant past is correct resume craft. Deleting it is not, and Ariadne had no way to tell the difference: older roles came out as a bare job title and company with everything they achieved gone, and a published book and a run of early employers vanished from the document entirely.
Older roles now keep one line saying what they actually produced, so a demotion costs you emphasis rather than the fact. Two sections were added for the things that had nowhere to go: Patents and Publications, and Other Experience, which is also where a long list of early employers can sit as a single line instead of disappearing.
Two smaller things in the same pass. The notes that used to sit under a degree or an award explaining why it mattered are gone from the document: that is teaching, and it belongs beside the resume rather than inside the one a recruiter opens. And a sentence that appeared in your summary will not now appear again word for word further down the page.
The plan at the end of an Ariadne run used to be the same advice for everybody: apply to this many roles a day, this many a week. It was never written for you and it never mentioned the throughline you had just spent an hour finding.
It is now up to six specific moves that use your positioning, each with a short reason and a sense of when to do it. Rewrite your headline to the throughline this week. Practise saying a particular one of your stories out loud before your first call, because that is the one that will get asked about. Where a move rests on a story you told, it links back to it.
Tick them off as you go and they stay ticked. Nothing counts them and nothing congratulates you: it is a checklist for you, not a score.
The end of a run used to be three screens: your resume, then a page proving the before and after, then somewhere to download from. The proof was one good example, shown once, chosen for you.
It is one screen now, and the proof is on every sentence that moved. Your throughline is at the top, because that is the thing you came for, and the resume sits under it as the evidence. Any line Ariadne repositioned is tinted, and opening it shows the words you actually wrote next to what they became, including the messy version you typed in conversation.
Use my original is beside every one of them. It puts your exact wording back into the document, no questions asked, and the line under the throughline keeps count of how much of the resume is still carrying the positioning. If most of it goes back to your own words, Ariadne offers to re-read rather than arguing with you.
Come back later and it tells you what you changed and when, and everything is still where you left it. Nothing expires.
Word files from Asterion were being made on A4, the European paper size, because no size was ever set and that was the default. On a US resume that costs you more than an inch of usable width, which is a large part of why long job titles kept wrapping onto a second line. They are US Letter now, and headers that used to break no longer need to.
Separately, when your resume did not include a phone number or an email address, Asterion printed [your phone] in the header rather than inventing one. Refusing to invent it was right. Printing it in the document you send was not.
Anything missing is now simply left out, and Asterion tells you what it left out in the notes beside your packet, which is how the missing city has always worked. Nothing in brackets reaches the file you send.
The last step on the progress rail kept spinning after your kit was finished, so a delivered kit looked like work still in progress. It marks itself done now.
And if you paste your resume and a job description and then close the tab, they are waiting when you come back. They always were, quietly. Ariadne now says so, once, instead of leaving you to wonder whether that is your text or somebody else's.
Save as PDF used to hand your document to your browser's print dialog and let whichever printer driver you had selected make the file. On Windows the common default, Microsoft Print to PDF, turns the page into an image. The file looked right and had no text in it: nothing could search it, no applicant tracking system could read it, and you could not copy a line out of your own document.
All four tools now write the PDF themselves. The text is real text, sections do not break across pages mid-thought, and the date, page numbers and web address your browser used to stamp across every page are gone.
Daedalus had a worse version of the same problem. Its Save as PDF was producing blank pages. That is fixed too.
The screen at the end of a packet used to put about five hundred words of commentary between you and the document you came for. Three panels of notes, several numbers that did not add up, and no way to tell which sentence any of it was actually about.
It has been rebuilt around the document. Your resume and the download buttons are the screen now, and anything Asterion wants to tell you is a mark on the exact sentence it concerns. None of it appears until you ask for it.
A red underline means that line does not rest on your words alone: something was inferred, sharpened, or reasoned to from what you gave it. Open it and you get one short note saying what the claim is and what the risk is, with Confirm and Rewrite this sentence beside it. You can edit any line in place, and what you write replaces what Asterion wrote. If you change your mind, the original is still there.
When Asterion wanted a specific it could not honestly invent, a number or a scale, it now says so instead of guessing, and you can type that number straight into the note. It gets worked into the sentence properly rather than stapled onto the end.
Nothing blocks a download at any point in this. The buttons are there before any of the notes are, and they are repeated under the document, so finishing your edits does not mean scrolling back to the top to get your file.
The note Asterion writes about its own work used to open by describing its method: that it had reasoned some of this from your material rather than lifting it word for word. That sentence arrived on every packet and there was nothing you could do with it.
Notes are now twenty-five words or fewer and start at the substance. What the claim is, and what to check. There are two kinds instead of five, because there are really only two questions worth asking about a line: does it rest on your words, or does it not.
The numbers reconcile now too. There is one count on the screen, and it is the number of claims you have not settled yet.
Packets used to be kept for different lengths of time depending on what you were paying when you made them. A free one disappeared after thirty days. A subscriber's stayed indefinitely, including after the subscription ended.
There is one rule now. Every packet is kept for a year from the day you built it, and nothing about that changes when a subscription starts, lapses, or resumes. The subscription decides how many packets you can build. That is the only thing it decides.
This applies to packets you already have, not only new ones. If you had a free packet that was heading for the thirty day cliff, it is not any more.
Come back to a saved packet and it tells you the date it is kept until, shows which claims you settled and when, and lets you carry on from there. You can delete any packet outright whenever you want. Your dashboard also shows your packets whether or not you have a subscription, so a free one is no harder to find than a paid one.
Someone finished a packet, saw the last step on the progress rail still spinning, and asked whether anything had actually been saved. It had been. The spinner was the problem: the final step never marked itself finished, so a delivered packet looked like work still in progress.
That step completes now, and the screen says in ordinary words that your packet is saved and you can close the tab and come back to it. Come back and it tells you when you saved it and how long it is kept.
Separately, if you close the tab or lose power partway through building one, the job description and the answer you typed are waiting when you return instead of an empty form.
The Before you send block reads a posting for the instructions that get an application filtered out when they are missed. It was listing the same requirement twice whenever a posting stated a rule and then restated it as a reminder, which postings do constantly.
Lines about the same requirement are now grouped into one instruction, with every phrase the posting used kept underneath it. Nothing the recruiter wrote is dropped. Two warnings about one thing is how you learn to skim the whole block, which is the opposite of what it is there for.
Job headers on screen ran the organization and the job title together with no space after the comma, so a line read as Quartz Critters, San Francisco Bay Area,Founder rather than Area, Founder.
Downloaded .docx files were never affected, so anything you have already sent was correct.
When the AI behind the tools was briefly at capacity, you could get dropped mid-run and lose what you had entered. That is the worst possible moment to lose anything, because it is usually right after the longest bit of typing.
The tools now wait out a busy period and pick up where you were, using the service's own timing rather than guessing. You may see a short pause instead of an error.
A tester sent back a marked-up copy of every edit she made to her packet by hand, which turned out to be the most useful thing anyone has ever sent about the tool. Six of those edits were the tool's fault, and all six are fixed.
Your name line is now just your name: credentials that belong after it no longer get pulled up into it. Nothing infers your location any more, so a city you never gave it cannot appear. Job headers break at the boundary between your title and the organization instead of wherever the line happened to run out. Education keeps its honors. An employer's name is not split across lines, and the same content cannot land twice in one document.
If you generated a packet before this date and reused it, the next one you generate will be laid out slightly differently. That is deliberate, and it should need less cleanup.
Cover letters could go out with an unfilled placeholder in the greeting, the classic bracketed hiring manager's name. It happened often enough to be embarrassing rather than rare.
Letters are now checked for unfilled placeholders before you ever see them. If a name genuinely is not known, the letter opens in a way that reads as written rather than as a template somebody forgot to finish.
There is a new optional box on the intake screen: anything specific you want worked in. A short note, up to 500 characters.
It exists because people were downloading a packet, opening Word, and adding one line by hand every single time. Usually something the tool could not have known: that you live ten minutes from the office, that you have met the team, that you are relocating anyway.
What you write there goes into the cover letter only, never into the resume, and it is used as you wrote it rather than elaborated into a paragraph of motive you did not claim.
Each tool remembers what you have told it so the next one does not start from nothing. The problem was that it filed the same fact under a slightly different name each run, so one story about killing your own feature could end up stored three times in three wordings.
That mattered more than tidiness. Anything you had explicitly corrected could come back as though it were new, which meant the tools could tell you something you had already told them was wrong.
Now the tools can see what they have already recorded before they record anything else, so a fact you have given once stays one fact, and a correction stays corrected.
Ariadne, Asterion, Daedalus and Thalia now read from and write to one shared profile, so work you do in one is not thrown away when you open another. Answer something once and the next tool starts from there.
You are in charge of it. Everything held about you is visible in your account settings, and clearing it genuinely deletes it rather than hiding it from the page.
Something here break your flow?
Tell me. Changes that make the tools worse for how you actually work are the ones I most want to hear about, and they are the hardest for me to see from the inside. Write to Katie@FindRedThreads.com, and link the entry if it is about a specific change.
