Track career-ladder evidence, locally, as it happens.
There's also a local dashboard — see the full tour with screenshots →
Every engineering manager knows the feeling: promo season arrives, and you're trying to reconstruct six months of a report's growth from memory, old Slack messages, and a vague sense that something good happened in March. Ladderline fixes that by giving you a place to jot a two-line note the moment something evidence-worthy happens — tagged against your team's actual career ladder — so a real, dated record builds itself quietly all year. When it's time to write the case, you're assembling, not remembering.
- Local-first. Everything lives in plain YAML/Markdown files on your machine — no server, no account, no database, nothing to trust with sensitive people-data but yourself.
- Never invents. Cases are assembled only from what you actually logged. Gaps are shown honestly, not smoothed over.
- Plain files, no lock-in. Notes are Markdown with YAML frontmatter — open them in any text editor, or Obsidian, or grep them. Nothing about this tool traps your data.
npm install -g @umbrova/ladderlineOr try it without installing anything:
npx @umbrova/ladderline init# Create a workspace in the current folder
ladderline init
# Define a review period
ladderline cycle add 2026-Q1 --start 2026-01-01 --end 2026-03-31
# Start tracking someone against the bundled default ladder
ladderline track "John Doe" --ladder generic-ic-ladder.yaml --as report
# Log evidence the moment something happens — takes 10 seconds
ladderline note "Pushed back on the caching design, adopted by 3 teams" \
--person "John Doe" --tag technical-direction --date 2026-02-10
# See it all in the local dashboard
ladderline dashboard
# When review time comes, assemble a case from everything you logged
ladderline case "John Doe" --cycle 2026-Q1That last command writes ./cases/2026-Q1/john-doe.docx — a structured brief grouped by competency, every line traceable to a dated note you actually wrote, with any competency that has zero evidence shown honestly rather than glossed over.
- Tracking direct reports heading toward a promotion
- Your own case, if you're building evidence for your own next level
- Peer or 360 contributions — logging what you noticed about someone outside your reporting line, for when their manager asks
Track anyone with --as report | self | mentee | cross-team | peer — the mechanism is the same regardless of the relationship.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
ladderline init [--demo] |
Create a new workspace, optionally seeded with a demo person and one deliberate evidence gap |
ladderline ladder list |
Show ladders registered in this workspace |
ladderline ladder add <file> |
Register a ladder file |
ladderline ladder remove <file> [--force] |
Remove a registered ladder |
ladderline track <name> --ladder <file> --as <relationship> |
Start tracking a person |
ladderline untrack <name> [--purge] |
Stop tracking (archives by default; --purge permanently deletes, asks you to type the name to confirm) |
ladderline note <text> --person <name> [--tag <id> | --notag] [--date <date>] |
Log a single evidence note |
ladderline note-delete --person <name> --date <date> [--tag <id> | --notag] [--filename <name>] |
Delete a single note (always asks to confirm) |
ladderline cycle add <name> --start <date> --end <date> |
Define a review period |
ladderline cycle list |
Show defined cycles |
ladderline cycle remove <name> |
Remove a defined cycle |
ladderline case [name] --cycle <name> [--format docx|md] [--all] [--as <relationship>] [--prompt] |
Assemble a case — one person, or --all for everyone |
ladderline notag list [--person <name>] |
List notes not yet mapped to a competency |
ladderline export [--person <name>] [--cycle <name>] [--since <date>] |
Zip the workspace, or a filtered slice of it |
ladderline import <file.zip> [--force] |
Restore or merge a workspace from an export |
ladderline dashboard [--port <port>] |
Launch the local web dashboard |
Every command supports --help. Full details, file formats, and conventions live in the wiki.
ladderline dashboard starts a local web server (default http://localhost:4200, reachable only on your machine) with five views:
- Person — one person at a time, each competency as a row, with note counts and how fresh the evidence is
- Team grid — everyone at a glance, competencies as columns, for spotting gaps before calibration
- Notes — every logged note, filterable and expandable to its raw file
- Insights — coverage percentage, what's going stale, your own logging cadence, and cycle readiness
- Docs — the same reference material as the wiki, rendered locally so it works fully offline
A small badge in the top bar surfaces when something needs attention — the same signal also shows up as a one-line nudge before any command's output, right in your terminal.
Every note is Markdown with YAML frontmatter:
---
person: john-doe
tag: technical-direction
date: 2026-02-10
cycle: 2026-Q1
---
Pushed back on the caching design in the payments migration doc,
proposed the write-through approach, and 3 other teams adopted it
after her RFC review.You can write these by hand — in Obsidian, in any editor, however you like. Ladderline doesn't care how a note was created, only that it's a valid file in the right place. Full conventions are documented in the wiki.
- Bugs or ideas → Issues or Discussions
- See CONTRIBUTING.md for how the codebase is organized
No telemetry, ever — nothing about your usage leaves your machine.
MIT — see LICENSE.