BrainCue

20 · What is switched off, and what it would take to switch back

src/shared/flags.ts gates surfaces that are designed, built, or shipped but not currently offered. This records the two that hide working code, because a flag with no written reason becomes a mystery within a release — and because an audit of jobSearch found that “quarantined” had come to mean invisible rather than inert.

1. The rule a flag must obey

A flag that hides a surface must also stop the behaviour behind it. If it does not, the app keeps acting on data the user can no longer see, edit, or delete — and no bug report will ever describe it accurately, because from the outside nothing looks wrong.

FLAGS is read only in the renderer and in voiceService. Nothing in src/main reads FLAGS.jobSearch, so it can never gate retrieval. Anything that must actually stop has to be gated on its own terms, in main. That is why the two rules below are expressed as retrieval conditions rather than as flag checks.

2. jobSearch — the Tailor Resume page + the applications table

Off. The standalone page and the applications table belong to the interview-copilot product; leading with them misrepresents what BrainCue now is. Tables, IPC, repositories, and pages are intact and users’ rows are untouched.

Tailoring itself came back, in the right place. An interview Space now carries its own tailored_resume (migration 0016), produced from that Space’s JD via jobs:tailor-resume and offered in the Space editor under the JD it tailors against. That is the shape the old design could not express: an application owned a hidden pack, so a tailored résumé could never attach to a Space the user actually had, and the only entry point navigated to /tailor carrying no Space at all. What stays off is the page, the applications table, and the separate résumé×JD workflow around them.

Known problems if it is flipped back, all found by audit rather than by use, because nothing renders these surfaces and no test covers the flag:

Problem	Where
The only entry point passes no Space. navigate('/tailor') carries no id, so the page opens empty	SpacesTab.tsx
Tailoring for an existing Space is not implemented at any layer — applications.tailor takes no packId and always mints a new hidden pack	applications.ipc.ts
The page carries its own profile <Select>, which the one-profile-at-a-time rule forbids	TailorPage.tsx
applicationsRepo.page() returns applications across all profiles	applications.repo.ts
The save prompt cannot see an application-owned Space (notApplicationOwned), so a session started from Tailor lands on a blank Space picker and can silently keep nothing	SavePromptModal.tsx
The start call passes no activity, so the row gets activity=null and falls back to interview	TailorPage.tsx
No test asserts either the off-state or the restored surface	—

3. storyBank — the STAR story bank as a managed surface

Off, and deliberately not simply re-enabled.

Bundled with jobSearch, it produced the one state that cannot be defended: retrieval force-included a strongly matching story in every interview, while the surface to see, edit, or delete those stories was hidden. Users were grounded on material they had no way to reach.

What replaced it: STAR survives as an answer format (AnswerFormat = 'star'), selectable live in the Cue Card. That is the part that was actually valuable in a behavioural interview — the scaffold the panel is scoring against, Situation · Task · Action · Result — without a bank of pre-generated stories to curate. It is distinct from story_teller, which optimises for how a story lands rather than for what an interviewer marks.

4. The two retrieval rules that make the above true

Both are enforced in main, on the mode, and both are fail-closed — a caller that says nothing gets the restrictive behaviour.

A STAR story chunk is force-included only for interview-family modes. ground() derives this from the session’s mode (STORY_CUE_MODES).

A tailored résumé substitutes for the base résumé only for interview-family modes. It previously ran in every mode with no gate, so one leftover application silently suppressed the user’s real résumé in unrelated meetings — the model was told their experience was the version rewritten for a job they applied to once. Proven live during the audit, then pinned by tests in sessionArchive.test.ts.

ground() takes no default mode. It used to default to 'interview' — the one value that turns both of the above ON — so a caller who forgot the argument opted silently into interview-only retrieval. voiceService did exactly that, and every voice quick ask force-injected a résumé anecdote into a generic answer. A missing argument must never be the permissive case.

5. What users were told

Nothing, at the time. The in-app What’s New view renders every changelog/*.md, so releases 1.1.0, 1.3.0, and 1.4.0 still described Tailor Resume, the applications table, and the story bank in the present tense — one of them naming the exact page to go to — long after all three were unreachable. The retraction is in changelog/2.1.0.md. A feature withdrawn without a changelog entry reads as a bug to the person who used it.

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