Progress update, 15 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.

An unattended cover run failed its own integrity check and left nothing behind to diagnose it with: no candidate, no session record. Rendering the prompt locally and hashing variants identified it exactly: the attested digest is sha256(prompt + "\n"). That is the signature of hashing an echoed string in a shell. Switching the attestation from text to a digest a fortnight ago closed the Unicode serialisation boundary and not the shell’s trailing newline.
Ben’s call was to accept exactly one appended newline and nothing else. A second newline, a CRLF, a leading newline, a trailing space and a single dropped character all still fail, and both directions were mutation-checked.
The retry selected a different article, because the failed one was deprioritised by its own recorded failure, and it passed.
Second instance of the development-years fault: a cover for “The Development of the Mazda RX-8” asked for 2001-2003 for a car sold from 2003. Both instances are articles whose titles start “The Evolution of” or “The Development of”, which is a pattern rather than a coincidence. The images were correct both times.
A 23-minute article run outlived the 15-minute sudo credential, so the job queued behind it sat waiting for a human. Worth knowing before anything depends on two long steps in sequence.