Frequently asked questions

Plain-language answers about how FOX3 scores jobs, what it costs, where your files live, and what it can and can't do yet. This is the closed-beta build, so some answers point to the deeper pages for the full detail.

Still have questions? Please email [email protected].

About the beta

What does "beta" mean here?

FOX3 is in a closed beta — an early test version shared with a small group of invited testers (that's you). It works end-to-end, but it is not a finished product:

• Some things will be rough or break. You may hit bugs, half-built features, or runs that don't go perfectly. That's expected, and reporting it is the whole point of a beta.
• The build isn't code-signed yet, so Windows and macOS will warn you the first time you open it. That's normal for beta software — see the install guide for the one-click way past it.
• It's free to use during the beta. See cost below for who pays for the AI.
• Things may change. Features, defaults, and the way scores work can shift between beta builds as I tune them according to feedback.

Found a bug or have feedback? Email [email protected] with "FOX3 beta feedback" in the subject. (Please don't paste API keys or full CVs into feedback.)

Scoring & AI

How are jobs scored out of 10?

Every listing FOX3 finds is sent to Claude (an AI model) together with your profile. Claude reads both and returns a relevance score from 0.0 to 10.0, plus a short written reason. It weighs your target roles, seniority, skills, experience and goals; your preferences (remote/hybrid/ on-site, commute, travel, industries, hard no-gos); the listing's own text; and anything you've taught it through ratings and confirmed ranking rules.

The score then sorts each listing into a bucket (these are the defaults; you can change the cut-offs in Settings):

• ⭐ Top Picks — 7.0 and above
• 🟡 Worth Reviewing — 6.0 to 6.9
• 🔵 Peripheral — 4.5 to 5.9 (shown as a short, collapsed entry)
• Anything below 4.5 is dropped from the digest (just counted in the summary)

The score is a judgment, not a calculation. There's no point-by-point formula — Claude reads everything and forms an overall opinion, the way an experienced recruiter would glance at a posting and say "that's about a 7 for you." Run the same listing twice and the number might shift slightly. Treat it as a smart sorting aid, not a precise grade.

How does FOX3 estimate competition and interview odds?

In the same judgment, Claude also gives two quick reads: Competition (Low / Medium / High) and Interview probability (Unlikely / Possible / Likely / Strong).

FOX3 does not know how many people actually applied to a job. It pulls no applicant counts, hiring statistics, or external market data, and there's no statistical model behind these labels. "High competition" means "this reads like a broad role that usually attracts a lot of applicants" — an educated guess from the text, not a count. Use them like a friend's gut reaction: great for prioritizing, not a market report. Read them alongside the "Why it fits" and "Concerns" notes on each card.

Where does FOX3 use AI — and where does it deliberately not?

FOX3 is AI-augmented, not AI-everything. It uses Claude (model Claude Sonnet 4.6) only where genuine judgment is needed, and plain, predictable code for everything else.

Why it's drawn this way: safety (every AI call that reads a job listing is locked to "text in, answer out" — Claude can never click, fetch, or run anything, so a booby-trapped listing can't make FOX3 do anything); privacy (your contact details are stripped out before your profile is ever sent for scoring); control (AI only ever proposes profile changes — you confirm each one); and predictability and cost.

What are the interviews for, and how do they affect my rankings?

Your profile is the one thing every score is judged against, and the interviews are how it's built and kept accurate.

• The core interview — a short, forgiving conversation (English or German) covering your roles, experience, goals, work preferences and hard no-gos. You can hand it your CV first to pre-fill the easy facts. Progress is saved after every message, so an interruption never loses anything, and you get a review screen at the end.
• The optional "deepening" interview — ~5–8 extra questions that directly shape rankings, by capturing concrete evidence for a skill and ranking rules you explicitly confirm (e.g. "rank roles with customer contact higher"). Each confirmed rule lets Claude nudge a borderline listing up or down by 1–2 points.
• The ongoing feedback loop — rate listings 1–5 after each digest. Your recent ratings feed into every future run, and when you ask, Claude reviews them and proposes profile updates you approve or reject one by one.

Cost & cost caps

What does FOX3 cost, and can it overspend?

FOX3 itself is free during the beta. The only thing that costs money is the AI — the calls to Claude that score and research jobs. There are two ways that's paid for:

• A sponsored key I issue you for the beta — I fund it, so it's free to you. It has its own spend-cap baked in.
• Your own key (BYOK) — you pay Anthropic directly for what you use, at their standard API rates.

Either way, FOX3 enforces its own spending caps on every AI call so a run can't run away with cost. The defaults:

When a cap is reached, the rest of that run's listings are simply not scored (they're marked "Budget cap reached — not scored" rather than given a misleading number). There's also a kill-switch you can flip to stop all AI calls instantly.

One thing testers notice: very relaxed search settings can return a huge pile of listings that uses up the run budget on basic scoring, so the deeper employer research gets skipped to protect cost. That's by design — tighten the region or keywords to let a run go deeper. See known issues.

Privacy & your data

What's the short version of the privacy model?

FOX3 is local-first. Your profile, the scored-jobs database, your reports and your settings all live in a folder on your machine (see below). There is no FOX3 server, no account, and no telemetry — nothing about you is collected on my side.

The only things that ever leave your device:

• Your search keywords go to the job boards (to fetch listings) — not your profile.
• Your profile and the listings go to Anthropic's API, to interview you and score jobs. Your contact details are stripped out first. Anthropic's API is stateless, isn't used for training, and inputs are auto-deleted within ~30 days.
• Your digest goes to Discord or email only if you turn those on.
• An anonymous update check to this site — no identifier, nothing about you.

Your API key is kept in your operating system's secure store (Windows Credential Manager / macOS Keychain), never in a plain file.

→ Read the full privacy & security model for the complete egress list and the details on sponsored keys, optional sources, and signed updates.

Your installation

Where are my files? (app + data folder)

FOX3 installs into its own isolated environment and keeps your data in a separate data folder, so an uninstall or update never touches it.

You can choose a custom data location during setup; FOX3 records it in a small location.json pointer so every run and update finds it. The installer also prints the exact resolved paths at the end. Full detail — including updating and uninstalling — is on the install guide.

Why do I see both "FOX3" and "JobScout"?

FOX3 is the product name. JobScout (lower-cased jobscout in code) is the project's original name, and it still shows through in a few technical places — it's the same app, not a different one:

• your data folder is named JobScout (e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%\JobScout),
• the download file is jobscout-beta-latest.zip, and
• the command that removes the app is pipx uninstall jobscout.

If you see both names, nothing is wrong. FOX3 is the name I'm standardizing on; the jobscout references are the underlying package showing through, and they'll line up over time.

Limitations

What are the current limitations I should know about?

The shortlist for this beta:

• Austria only. The default job boards are Austrian — AMS, StepStone.at, willhaben and karriere.at. There's no support for other countries yet.
• The interface is mostly English. The interview and the digest are available in English and German, but the control-panel and wizard chrome are English-only for now. Full German localization is planned.
• The build isn't code-signed yet, so you'll get a SmartScreen (Windows) or "unidentified developer" (macOS) warning the first time. Signing comes with the public release.
• No auto-apply. FOX3 surfaces and ranks roles; you decide and apply yourself. That's by design and won't change.
• Dedicated company-page scraping isn't built yet (naming a priority employer still boosts its listings in scoring).
• PDF CVs can parse imperfectly — a .docx, .txt or .md CV gives the cleanest profile. You will always be shown what information FOX3 was able to extract from your CV, so that you can make corrections if it got anything wrong.

→ See the full known-issues list and roadmap

Why does FOX3 exist?

I first made this app for myself because manually sifting through job boards sucks.

As it turns out, the world's job markets are currently in an insane arms-race between AI-apply-bots and AI-screening-bots.

These AI "services" that claim to help you land a job are exploitative and unethical, but most importantly they put your reputation at risk. I could rant about this for hours, so I'll write up a proper manifesto for the actual release. But for now, I'm focused on making a good product.