Progress update, 20 Aug 2026

Updates are bullet-point summaries generated with AI from my commits and build notes, then checked by me. Project articles and learning notes are written by me.

The first real pipeline run published a live article by accident. npm exec tsx … --drafts --no-push consumed both safety flags before the generator ever saw them, so a run meant to write a local draft committed and pushed. Reverted within minutes, but the fix is the lesson: there is now one supported entry point with the -- separator, and a test that proves both flags arrive at the script unchanged.
The second and third runs went as designed. One was rejected by both reviewers and committed only its run record; the next passed at 9/10 from both, with 37% overlap and a 21-word longest run, and became the first machine-written article on the site, as a draft.
Publication dates were being computed in UTC, which puts an article on the wrong calendar day for anyone who has a calendar. They now come from the site’s declared timezone, with boundary tests.
Replanned the cover work away from a paid image API inside the nightly job and toward a supervised backfill run from an interactive session on an existing subscription. Articles publish text-only with a placeholder until a cover catches up.
Cover status is derived from article frontmatter and nothing else. A second, hand-maintained queue of “what still needs a cover” is exactly the file that goes stale and then gets trusted.