Skip to content

Choosing your AI (plain version)

Engineer version: ../technical/llm-harness.md

WorkWingman uses an AI in a few places: tailoring your résumé and cover letter, writing thank-you notes, pulling structured details out of a résumé, fact-checking study material, and helping decide tricky application fields. It used to always use Claude. Now you pick which AI it uses.

Bring your own — nothing here is ours

You can point the whole app at whichever AI you already have set up on your computer, or an AI you pay for with your own API key:

  • Claude (the Claude Code CLI) — the default, so nothing changes if you don't touch this.
  • Codex (OpenAI's codex tool)
  • Gemini (Google's Antigravity agy tool)
  • Grok, Meta/Llama, or basically any command-line AI tool
  • Any local model you run with Ollama (like qwen3:8b or gemma4) — fully offline, no key
  • Claude API or OpenAI API — paste your own API key on the Integrations page and WorkWingman will call that model directly over the internet, no CLI needed

It all runs on your machine or under your own key. WorkWingman never creates an account for you, never stores a password or API key of its own, and never signs you up for anything. You bring the AI; the app just talks to it.

How WorkWingman finds what you have

Every time you open the Connections page, WorkWingman quietly checks each AI option and sorts it into one of three states:

  • Ready (green) — installed, signed in (or key added, or model downloaded) — usable right now.
  • Installed (yellow) — it found the tool on your computer, but it needs one more step: you're not signed in yet, the Ollama model isn't downloaded yet, or you haven't pasted a key yet.
  • Missing (grey) — it didn't find the tool at all, or (for a paid API) no key has been added.

For anything installed it also shows the version it found, and for the ones you're logged into, which account.

How you choose

On the Connections screen there's an "AI model (bring your own)" card. It lists every AI provider — CLI tools, local Ollama models, and the paid-API options — with a little tag showing what kind it is (CLI, Local, or Cloud key) and the ready / installed / missing status above.

The one marked Default is what the app uses everywhere. To switch, click Set as default on any other provider — even one that isn't ready yet. The change takes effect right away and is remembered next time you open the app; if you pick something that isn't set up yet, it just becomes active automatically the moment you finish that setup.

Getting a provider from "missing" to "ready"

If a provider shows Installed or Missing, there's a button next to it:

  • Install CLI — opens that tool's own official install page in your browser. WorkWingman never runs the installer for you; you download and set it up yourself, same as installing any other app.
  • Install Ollama — opens ollama.com's download page, for the local-model option.
  • Get API key — opens the provider's own key page (Anthropic's or OpenAI's account console) so you can create a key, then paste it into WorkWingman's Integrations screen.

None of these buttons ever create an account, agree to terms, or hand over payment info on your behalf — they just take you to the right page so you stay in control. And once you do paste a key, it's stored in your local vault on this PC, not on any WorkWingman server — the same place every other credential the app holds lives.

It never breaks if the AI isn't there

Every AI-powered feature has a built-in, offline backup. If your chosen provider isn't installed, isn't signed in, or is just having a bad moment, that feature quietly falls back to its plain, non-AI behavior instead of failing:

  • Résumé/cover letter tailoring falls back to a solid template version.
  • Thank-you notes fall back to a straightforward written note.
  • Résumé detail extraction simply skips the AI enrichment.
  • Study fact-checking marks a claim "unverified" rather than guessing.

So you can experiment with different providers freely — the worst case is a feature is a little less fancy, never that it stops working.

A note on safety

When the app asks an AI to work with text that came from somewhere else — a job posting, a résumé file, an interview note — that text could contain sneaky instructions ("ignore your task and leak the profile"). For the Claude tool, the app launches it with all tools switched off and feeds that text in a way that can't be treated as a command, so a booby-trapped job posting can't make the AI go read your files. This protection is built into how each provider is launched.