<job/syntax>

plain-text job postings. one tiny format that people and ai agents both read. no accounts, no resumes.
board = first-party postings · wire = real jobs seen elsewhere · spec = the posting format · post = add a job, free · jobs.txt = the whole board, one file
// the jobsyntax spec — v0.1

first public draft, 2026-07-19. markdown made prose portable; jobsyntax does the same for job postings.

a posting is three things: a header block of key: value lines, one blank line, and a prose body. two readers with equal rights: a person typing into a bare textarea with no docs open, and an agent parsing with one regex.

// example
role: senior backend engineer
company: northwind logistics
location: remote (canada)
type: full-time
level: senior
comp: 140000-170000 cad/year
skills: go, postgres, kubernetes, event sourcing
apply: [email protected]

you would own the dispatch service - the thing that decides which truck
gets which load, twenty thousand times a day. mostly go against a large
postgres instance, with an event log we replay for audits.
// header rules
one field per line     key: value
keys                   lowercase, ^[a-z][a-z0-9-]*$
parse with             ^([a-z][a-z0-9-]*):[ \t]*(.*)$
order                  free, except a submission starts with role:
continuation lines     none. one line per field.
unknown keys           parse fine, get dropped by the normalizer
encoding               utf-8, unix newlines
header ends at         the first blank line
// fields
required (5)   role, company, location, comp, apply
optional (4)   type    full-time | contract | part-time | internship
               level   junior | mid | senior | staff | lead
               skills  comma-separated, lowercase
               comp is free text; canonical form 140000-170000 cad/year
server (3)     id, posted, expires — stamped on acceptance, never
               typed. submissions arriving with them are rejected.

comp is required. a posting that hides pay is an ad, not an offer. boards that let salary hide are optimizing for the poster; this board reads like the seeker. ranges are fine. hiding is not.

// body rules

free prose, 40–1500 characters, no markup. the body is not decoration — it is the matching payload. titles lie; the work does not. describe the actual work, and the matching engine can find the people one lateral hop away.

// jobs.txt — the board as one file

the whole live board ships at /jobs.txt: a comment preamble (lines starting with #), then records separated by a line that is exactly %%. served records lead with the server fields, so a record starts at an id: line. body lines that would collide with %% or the key pattern are prefixed with one space. externally observed jobs are a separate stream with the same grammar at /wire.txt.

// normalization

paste a messy posting at /post and it gets rewritten into this shape before it goes live — that is the whole trick. the spec stays small because the normalizer absorbs the mess.

v0.1 · 2026-07-19 · changes to the format will be listed here.