Progress update, 21 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 finding of the session: a green rollback suite that had never rolled anything back. Twenty-four passing tests, and every failure case aborted during validation, before a single byte was written. Undoing nothing always succeeds. Added a seam that injects a failure mid-batch and tests that assert every article is byte-identical afterwards, rather than merely that something threw.
Cloud sync had renamed two tracked files, leaving them as deletions with byte-identical (1) twins beside them. Both are named by the build or the test script, so three gates would have failed and every failure would have read as a defect in the new code I was about to commit. Confirm the tree is the tree you think it is before believing a gate failure.
git diff --cached --stat caught a test fixture staged as Bin 0 -> 10214 bytes: a literal NUL byte written where the escape \u0000 was meant. Two other fixtures held literal zero-width characters, which are valid UTF-8 and would not have tripped the check at all, while being invisible to every reviewer. Control characters get written as escapes from now on.
Sharp refused an oversized image from inside the metadata read, which made the explicit pixel-count check unreachable and left “could not be decoded” as the only reportable cause. Judging the declared dimensions first refuses the image before a pixel is read and names the real reason. The decode limit stays as a backstop for a header that lies about its own size.
Image shape is judged after EXIF orientation is applied, not before. A portrait photograph tagged sideways is still a portrait photograph.
Article titles reach the image prompt, so they are treated as data: the prompt declares the fenced block non-instructional before the block appears, each fence marker occurs exactly once, and evidence containing a marker is rejected. The blocklist is documented as defence in depth behind the fence, not as the defence.
Made “do not invent specifics” checkable instead of merely intended. The fixed half of the recipe contains no year, model, trim or place, and a test asserts every number in a finished prompt traces back to the article. Editing the style block to mention an era now fails that test.