Scope startup checks to requested career work

[woud420]

Primary changes

Repository maintenance and explanation requests currently inherit a silent updater check and onboarding before any other work. Scope updater checks to update-related requests and run setup checks only when the requested product mode needs prerequisites that are not already known to be ready.

Reviewer walkthrough

• Add a short task-scope rule distinguishing product work from maintenance and explanations.
• Example: correcting a documentation reference can finish without checking for updates or copying personalization templates. A requested evaluation still needs its candidate source data.
• Limit missing-prerequisite questions to the requested mode and continue independent work.

Correctness and invariants

The Data Contract, privacy boundaries, updater apply confirmation, and candidate-source requirements remain in place. The doctor check's template-copy side effect is explicit. Unrelated missing files no longer block otherwise valid work.

Testing and QA

• node --test tests/agent-docs-script-refs.test.mjs: 7 passed.
• Executed the existing test-all.mjs routing and interview-prep contract blocks in a filesystem-only harness: 9 assertions passed; full suite not run.
• git diff --check: passed; only AGENTS.md changed.
• No updater, doctor, onboarding, job search, or career pipeline was invoked.
• Contribution checklist: CONTRIBUTING.md read; no personal data or user-layer files changed. This is a workflow/documentation fix. The full runtime suite was not run for this instruction-only change.

Risk / Rollout

This narrows setup and permission-sensitive startup behavior and remains a draft for review. A future runtime check cannot be assumed cached across sessions; the rule is limited to known readiness in the current session and rechecks when setup changes. Existing apply/submit approvals remain unchanged.

Resolves ENG-447

[coderabbitai]

Important

Draft PR not reviewed

Draft PRs are not automatically reviewed by default.

• Trigger a manual review

To automatically review draft PRs, update your CodeRabbit configuration:

reviews:
  auto_review:
    drafts: true

---

Thanks for using CodeRabbit! It's free for OSS, and your support helps us grow. If you like it, consider giving us a shout-out.

❤️ Share

• X
• Mastodon
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}

[github-actions]

Welcome to career-ops, @woud420! Thanks for your first PR.

A few things to know:

• Tests run automatically, but on a first contribution they wait for a maintainer to approve the run: if it looks stuck, that queue is on us, not on you
• Link a related issue if this is a feature (bug fixes, providers, docs and translations need no issue)
• CONTRIBUTING.md has the specifics

We review every PR by hand. Join our Discord if anything blocks you.