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Setup

Next: Connect Claude Code

  1. Connect Claude Code

    not complete

    Bly runs on your own subscription, on your own machine. Until then it uses the rules-only engine: the board still works, but a Role's Stage only moves when you reply or move it yourself. Reading an invitation or an offer out of the mail takes a model.

  2. Connect Gmail

    not complete

    Read-only, plus permission to create drafts. Bly never sends, and never writes labels or any other state back to your mailbox.

  3. Turn on LinkedIn InMail email notifications

    not complete

    There is no LinkedIn integration and none is needed — an InMail arrives as an ordinary email you can reply to. LinkedIn → Settings → Communications → Email notifications → turn on InMail and messages.

  4. Write your brief

    not complete

    What you want, in prose. Everything on the board is scored against it.

Running it on your own mail

Bly is a program you run, so all of this happens in a terminal rather than here. You need a Google OAuth client of your own — about five minutes, once — so the credential to your mailbox is issued to you and never passes through anyone else’s servers.

npm i -g @yellow-pine/bly

# your own Google OAuth client; this command explains how to make one
bly connect

# read your mail into ~/.bly; resumable, safe to re-run
bly sync

# your board, on this machine
bly serve

The first sync walks the whole mailbox and is safe to interrupt — bly sync --max-pages=20 does a chunk at a time, and each later run picks up where it stopped. Everything it reads stays in ~/.bly.

Filling what the thread does not say

A recruiter’s message usually states the band, the location and the remote policy. It almost never states funding, headcount or the real stack. Bly asks a few sources for those, and it does this by default — a career agent that refused to go and look would not be much of one.

So be clear about what that means: a stock install does make third-party calls. A source is told a company domain and nothing else — never a subject, never a body, never an address, never the role. Your mail does not leave this machine either way; what changes is that a company name from it does. Bly says so on every launch rather than leaving you to find out.

GitHub — fills techStack, sector
Public repositories. Free, no account needed. Best answer available for what a company actually builds with.
Crunchbase — fills funding, headcount · needs your own key
Funding and headcount. Needs your own paid key — Crunchbase removed free API access in 2025, so this stays switched off until you supply one.
Glassdoor — linked, never fetched
Its public API was shut down in 2022, it issues no new keys, and it merged into Indeed in July 2026. The only remaining route is scraping the site, which its terms forbid. Bly links out instead and lets you look.
# on by default — nothing to do

# turn it off entirely
export BLY_ENRICH=none

# or pick exactly what you want
export BLY_ENRICH=github

# optional: raises GitHub's rate limit from 60/hour to 5,000
export BLY_GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_…

# Crunchbase removed free API access in 2025, so it waits for your own key
export BLY_CRUNCHBASE_KEY=…

Anything a source answers is marked with where it came from and when, and it only ever fills a blank — what you typed in wins, and so does what the thread actually said.