Progress update, 24 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.

Deleted a permanent command I had no business building. Stage C needed four rendered prompts, once, as evidence for a visual decision, and what got built was a covers:prompt CLI with flag parsing, two modes, a lister and its own test file. Rendering four files is a tool-shaped problem for about ten minutes; after that it is a supported interface with a maintenance cost. The rendering was done by a throwaway script that imports the real function directly, and package.json went back to byte-identical with HEAD.
Two agent sessions shared one checkout and the second inherited the first mid-flight. A plan written at 10:20 whose first item was “run the visual gate on the v1 prompts” was stale before it was read, because the other session had already run that gate, rejected the treatment and advanced to v3. Git records neither the author nor the time of an untracked file, so nothing in git status flags that half the pile arrived from somewhere else.
The dark workshop look was rejected in favour of pale concrete, diffused daylight and one orange accent, at a fixed eye-level three-quarter composition. Badges then became their own argument: the first badge-enabled edit invented large MR2 bumper lettering, and a generic Touareg render happily wore a V6 badge the article never claimed. The recipe now requires authentic badges only where the fenced evidence supports them.
Two guides turned out to be unusable as cover evidence, for reasons that are the corpus’s fault rather than the model’s. One description opens with a literal <p> left over from the migration. Not a control character, not an override phrase, so the sanitiser passes it straight through. The other truncates mid-sentence before the word “SUV”, leaving “the maker of some of the world’s best sports cars” as the prompt’s last word on the subject. Evidence pointing away from the body style is worse than no evidence.
Prompt snapshots are verified by re-rendering and comparing bytes, not appearance, so a “representative example” cannot quietly drift from what the code produces.
A gate run before the last few files are written is not a gate run on the change: git diff --check had been recorded as clean, then failed on trailing whitespace in two READMEs written after it.