What a work ledger is
Someone sent you a résumé with a file called ledger.md attached. This page explains it in the time it takes to read it, and how to check it in about a minute.
In one paragraph
A work ledger is a work history where every line carries a receipt: a public pointer anyone can look up. It was built on the person's own machine by their coding agent, from their own evidence: their GitHub account, pull requests and commits in other people's repositories, their papers, their résumé, and the work logs their agents keep. The agent copied facts out of command outputs; it did not type anything from memory. Lines that could not be checked against the world are marked self-reported. The résumé you received cites the ledger's receipts; the ledger is where you check them.
What a line looks like
- gh:pr:gradio-app/trackio#680 · https://github.com/gradio-app/trackio/pull/680 · opened 2026-08-30 · merged 2026-09-08 · "fix: decode UTF-8 blobs in query output"The id says what kind of receipt it is, the URL is where it lives, the rest is what the command printed.
| id | what it is | who can check it |
|---|---|---|
gh:repo:owner/name | a repository the person owns | anyone, via api.github.com |
gh:pr:owner/name#N | a pull request they authored in someone else's repository | anyone |
gh:commits:owner/name | commits of theirs in someone else's repository | anyone, via GitHub commit search |
paper:W… | a paper in OpenAlex with them among the authors | anyone, via api.openalex.org |
pos:… | a position, from their own résumé | nobody; it is marked self-reported for that reason |
local:… | a private repository, by a hash of the commit ids | whoever has access to that repository |
How to check one
The ledger ends with a "How to check" section: one command per kind. For a pull request:
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/gradio-app/trackio/pulls/680 | jq '{author:.user.login, created_at, merged_at}'The author must be the GitHub login named in the ledger's header, and the dates must match the line. That is all "holds" means: the pointer exists and belongs to that person. It says nothing about quality or difficulty; read the work for that.
If you use a coding agent, it can check the whole file for you: install the skill and say "verify this ledger".
npx skills add effortrank/effortrank --skill resume-ledgerSelf-reported lines
Positions and titles come from the person's résumé. The agent checked that each one appears in that document, not that it is true. They are listed so the résumé and the ledger agree, and marked so you know the difference.
The seal
Next to the ledger there may be a seal.json. When the ledger was built, the agent hashed the build and the person's agent transcripts and had the hash timestamped by public OpenTimestamps calendars. That proves the file existed unchanged on that date. It does not prove who wrote it or that its contents are true; the receipts do that part.
What it is not
Not a score, not a ranking, not an endorsement. Nobody reviewed it. It is a document that makes claims checkable, and it lists what could not be checked.
Privacy
The build runs on the person's machine and sends nothing but a 32-byte hash. The ledger contains only what the person chose to send you. The skill is open source: github.com/effortrank/effortrank.