| name | draft-outreach |
| description | Generate an outreach email draft grounded in ground-truth.md, the company research brief, the target contact, and a chosen template (cold-pitch / warm-followup / consulting-pitch / job-followup / interview-followup). Always saves to drafts/ and presents to the user for review. Never sends. send-outreach is a separate skill that requires explicit confirmation. |
| disable-model-invocation | false |
| allowed-tools | Read, Write, Bash(mkdir *), Bash(test *), Bash(date *) |
Draft Outreach
Builds an email draft from four inputs:
- Ground-truth (who the user is, what they do, freelance brand if applicable).
- Company research (the brief outputs in
research/companies/<slug>/).
- Target contact (name, role, email — usually from
find-contact).
- Template (the markdown template the user wants to base it on).
Always saves to drafts/ and shows the user for review. Sending is a separate skill (send-outreach).
Inputs
$ARGUMENTS:
- Required:
<company> — first positional.
- One of:
--contact-rank=<n> — pick from the most recent find-contact result.--contact="<name> <email>" — supply directly.
- Optional:
--template=<cold-pitch|warm-followup|consulting-pitch|job-followup|interview-followup> (default: based on heuristic — cold-pitch for first-touch, warm-followup if prior outreach exists in crm/outreach.md, interview-followup if invoked within 24h of a logged interview event).
- Optional:
--lens=<employer|client|partner> (default from CRM row, fallback employer).
- Optional:
--brief-as=<personal|business> — overrides ground-truth freelance-brand choice. Affects which sender will be used downstream.
Examples
/career:outreach draft acme --contact-rank=1 --template=cold-pitch
/career:outreach draft snowglobe --contact="Jane Doe jane@snowglobe.ai" --template=consulting-pitch
/career:outreach draft myrofish --contact-rank=2 # template auto-picked
Procedure
1. Resolve config + paths
${CAREER_DATA_DIR}/config.json → WORKING_FOLDER, PREFERRED_EMAIL_SENDER, SECONDARY_EMAIL_SENDER.
Compute slug. Confirm:
${WORKING_FOLDER}/ground-truth.md exists and is populated.${WORKING_FOLDER}/research/companies/${slug}/ has at least company-overview.md (warn if not — drafts without research read generic).
2. Resolve template
If --template provided, use it. Otherwise heuristic:
- Existing
crm/outreach.md row for this company with status in replied | meeting-booked | meeting-done → warm-followup.
- Logged interview event within 24h (check
meetings/ if present) → interview-followup.
- Lens is
client → consulting-pitch.
- Otherwise →
cold-pitch.
Read the template's EXAMPLE.md (and any user-customised template file beside it — templates/<template>/<custom>.md).
3. Resolve contact
If --contact-rank=<n> and a recent find-contact result exists in conversation, pick that row. Otherwise prompt user for the explicit contact.
4. Read inputs
- Ground-truth: who-i-am, looking-for, domains-of-interest, freelance-brand (if
--brief-as=business).
- Research: company-overview (mandatory if exists), recruitment-profile (if exists, for hiring context), cultural-fit (if exists, to anchor "why this company specifically").
- Outreach log: confirm no recent outreach to this same contact (anti-loop).
5. Draft
Fill the template's {{variables}}. Hard rules:
{{specific_observation}} must come from a real, cited fact in the research briefs. If no cite-worthy fact exists, ask the user for one before proceeding.{{your_relevance}} comes from ground-truth, not from generic boilerplate.{{ask}} is single, low-stakes, concrete (e.g. "20 minutes next week").- For
consulting-pitch: {{narrow_offer}} must be a single scope, not a menu.
- Length follows the template's frontmatter
length constraint. If the draft exceeds it, tighten.
6. Save draft
Path: ${WORKING_FOLDER}/drafts/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>-<contact-slug>.md.
Frontmatter:
---
status: draft
template: <template>
company: <company_name>
slug: <slug>
contact:
name: <name>
email: <email>
lens: <lens>
sender: <personal|business>
sender_email: <resolved from config + brief-as>
created: <ISO datetime>
sent_at: null
---
Body: subject line + email body in plain markdown.
7. Present for review
Show the draft to the user with this footer:
Draft saved: drafts/<file>
To send: /career:outreach send drafts/<file>
To edit: open the file directly, then re-run /career:outreach send
Do not auto-invoke send-outreach. Stop here.
Guardrails
- Never invent facts. The "specific observation" must trace to a research-brief citation.
- Never auto-send.
- Length budget honoured.
- Single ask.
- Subject lines: short, specific, never click-baity.
Failure modes
- Ground-truth missing or thin → bail with "run
/career:ground-truth first; drafts without ground-truth read generic and burn the contact."
- No research briefs for this company → warn, offer to run
/career:research-brief overview first or proceed with thin context (user choice).
- Template missing → list available templates.
- Anti-loop hit (recent outreach to same contact) → block with explanation; user can override with
--force.
Idempotency
- Re-running creates a new dated draft file (does not overwrite).
- Editing an existing draft file in place is supported;
send-outreach reads from disk, not from this skill's output.
