Progress update, 14 Sept 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 draft run under systemd failed on a revision call that hit the token cap after 859 visible characters, and the cause is that the model thinks. The server streams reasoning on a separate field, the pipeline discards it, and it still spends the cap and the wall clock. A probe measured 400 tokens and 103 seconds of pure reasoning with no content at all; with thinking disabled the same call took 34 tokens and 8.4 seconds. Ben chose to keep thinking on and raise the cap to 4096, so a truncation message now reports the reasoning characters too.
Covers became an unattended nightly job: select one missing article, generate, accept, apply, build, commit, push. A push adding a cover record opens a GitHub issue mentioning Ben, delivered by email and confirmed working, and a phone-triggered workflow reverts it. Every side effect is injected in tests, and three of the guards were mutated and watched failing.
A failed cover run leaves no committed record, so the batch itself carries the state file, so a run killed mid-flight stays marked started and counts as a failure. Three failures on one article excludes it from selection rather than letting it burn a generation every night.
Checking the Pi for a leaked API key with env | grep through sudo reported a match that was not there: sudo sets a variable containing the full command line, so grep matched its own text.
The alert path fired correctly and printed “(journal unavailable)”, because the handler unit could not read the journal it was reporting on. The failure path works; the part that tells you what failed did not.
The first Pi cover recorded model years of 2008-2012 for a car that went on sale in mid-2012. The derivation takes the dominant cluster of years in the article body, and a development history names the announcement, the prototype and the launch, so the cluster is the development period, not the production run. The image came back correct anyway. Left alone deliberately: changing the derivation mid burn-in would muddy the tally it is being measured by.