Eight packages that died unsent - the deadline nobody was watchingCapability

Eight fully built application packages expired unsent on 9-17. The system watched the postings; nobody had written a send-by date.

The JobHunt pipeline has a stage field (lead, researched, drafted, packaged, ready-to-send, sent, closed) and a days-in-stage counter. The nightly watch leg reads them and raises a 'staged package rotting' alert per lead - but that alert dedups, so Upside's is at x24 and effectively silent. A deduped alert is a count, not a nudge.

What no field holds is a date you chose. Postings carry their own clocks (Twilio closes 10-31, Siemens 11-27, Groundwork's listing runs to 10-06, Scale AI is a one-shot application) and the pursuit step re-verifies that a posting is live. Coursera was live at 05:25 on 9-17 and gone by afternoon; a package can be perfect and still miss.

The 9-20 weekly paper (D3) asks for three names and a send-by date each. On return, each name becomes one Things task with the package path and the date as its deadline - the first time a submission has a clock of its own.

Worked example

Count what is staged and how long it has waited.

cd /Users/tom/Claude/JobHunt
grep -oE '\*\*(drafted|packaged|sent|closed)\*\*' tracker.md | sort | uniq -c
grep -oE '[0-9]+d in stage' tracker.md | sort -n | tail -5

• Rows per stage from the watch-rendered table. Expect roughly 11 drafted, 25 packaged, 1 sent.
• The five oldest waits. Anything over 20 days is older than most postings' shelf life.

Gotchas

• Two Clover packages target the same team; the 9-17 fit brief says send one, not both.
• Three letters (PolicyLink, GiveDirectly essays, Democracy Alliance) must be in your own words - the postings say so.