Progress update, 31 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 plan’s own recommendation, to take the earliest and latest four-digit year in the article, was measured against the corpus and rejected. It yields 1984-1993 for a car built from 1989, because the article opens by mentioning the previous generation’s launch year. The plan had predicted that failure in the abstract; the counterexample was already sitting in the tree.
The guides’ own heading ranges were ruled out too: present in only 32 of 81 guides, and for one car the heading names the facelift years while the article is about the launch.
What shipped instead: a range declared in the human-written source section wins outright, and the article title is never consulted at all, because the title is model-written and the input type has no field for it. Failing that, take the dominant cluster of years in the body, breaking runs at a gap of more than four years, which is what discards the orphan 1984. The guide heading may veto a derivation it disagrees with, or widen one it agrees with, capped at a ten-year generation.
Four of five articles now derive their true generation range exactly. The thresholds are fitted to five articles, all three are asserted at their boundary, and the sixth article will be the first genuine out-of-sample test.
The recipe bump lives on a branch rather than main, because a version change makes every pending batch un-appliable by design. Keeping main on the old version leaves the working cover flow working while the new one waits for its visual gate.
Model years are written to a per-candidate sidecar at generation time, keyed by the image’s own hash, and the apply step reads it rather than re-deriving. A missing record is fatal, and one naming a different article aborts the batch before any write.
Two review passes found eight defects while the test suite was green at 581 the entire time. All four of the first pass’s findings came from reading the code against the corpus, not from running anything.