Progress update, 27 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 site published its first article without a human in the loop: drafted locally, passed by both reviewers, built, committed and pushed by the job itself, in 41 seconds. I offered to hand-publish an existing draft instead, to get a live page faster. Ben’s answer was “That is the whole point isn’t it?”, and he was right. The first public page was made by the machine.
Two runs in a row skipped on the same section, and the reviewer was correct both times. The source guide calls a Honda Integra an “Integrale Type R DC5”, which is a Lancia name, and the model was reproducing it faithfully. The same guide gets it right twice elsewhere. Fixed the guide, and the next run published on the first attempt.
Two tests went red because the work succeeded. Both asserted the live corpus still listed a particular article as missing a cover, a transient property of live content written down as an invariant. Worse, one of them is supposed to be testing command-line argument forwarding and had used cover status as its payload assertion, so a routine backfill could redden a test guarding something else entirely. Rewritten to prove forwarding in two ways that say nothing about content.
The deploy-timing check earned its place immediately. The live site still served the old text when first queried, so all five verification assertions would have passed against the previous build and told me nothing.
First three real covers applied. Original PNGs of 1.9-2.3 MB normalise to 59-70 KB, roughly 30x, and the generator returned two different aspect ratios, so the normaliser is load-bearing rather than incidentally correct. All three were accepted on the first candidate.
A run aborted in 1.3 seconds because the shell carried stale environment variables pointing at the old model on the wrong port, and it committed and pushed a failed run record, which is exactly the documented behaviour. A precondition failure that leaves a trace is the difference between a bad night and a silent fortnight.