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Company research has one purpose: to be there the night before an interview, when you do not have time to do it. Everything below is aimed at that moment.

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Researching a company

Research Helios and put it on their record.
research_company reads what is already on file — including every application and contact you have there — tells you what is missing, then writes the result back. The writing-back step is the one that needs care, and the workflow spells it out:
update_company replaces the notes field. The combined text has to be written back whole — what was already there plus what is new. Sending only the new part deletes the old research, which is the worst outcome available in this part of the product.

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What is worth recording

Not a company profile. The four things you will actually want later:
  • What they do and how they make money. In your words, not theirs.
  • The interview loop, if you know it. Rounds, who is in them, what each one is for.
  • Who you know there. The single highest-value line in the record.
  • Why you do or do not want this — the honest version, including the reservations.

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Two details that matter

Set website to their own domain. A Greenhouse or Ashby link is the job board, not the employer. The domain is what puts their logo on your pipeline, and it costs nothing to include. Mark unconfirmed things as unconfirmed. An assistant is told not to invent facts about a company, and to say when it is working from what you told it rather than from something it knows. Research that quietly mixes the two is research you cannot trust in three weeks.

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Preparing for a round

Get me ready for my system design round at Helios.
prep_for_interview gathers four things before writing anything: the application with its full posting and its whole timeline — what has already been said matters more than the posting does — the company research on file, the contacts at that company, and your own evidence for the two or three themes the posting leans on hardest. Then it gives you:

What they care about

The three things, read from the posting and the timeline together.

Your strongest true story for each

With the specific numbers from your brain. If a number is not on file, the story comes without one and you are told to check — never a metric invented for the occasion.

The likely questions

Including the weak spots in your own history for this role, which is the half nobody prepares.

Five questions to ask them

Drawn from the company research rather than generic ones.
Plus anything in the timeline worth following up on or referring back to — the thing the recruiter mentioned three weeks ago that you would otherwise have forgotten. If the research on file is thin, it says so and offers to run research_company first.

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Afterwards

The interview is new material about you, and it belongs back in the brain. Two minutes while it is fresh:
That was the system design round at Helios. They asked about scaling the billing pipeline and I walked through the Go rewrite — went well. The follow-up on multi-region I fumbled. Interviewer was Dana, staff engineer, seemed to own the platform.
That lands as a timeline entry on the application, a contact if Dana is new, and — the part people miss — material in the brain about how you answer that kind of question. The next prep sheet is better because of it.

Filling the brain

Why the loop back matters more than it sounds.