Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
Zombie draft, dead zone, zero-draft cron: three failure modes from one misread index
Ten cron cycles between 30 June and 13 July produced exactly one ready draft while the skip counter climbed from 2 to 7. Three distinct failure modes were active simultaneously—a zombie IHT draft reaching its third PR, a dead-zone mortgage cluster that never re-drafted, and zero-draft mornings with clean exit codes. The root cause was identical in each case: draft.py could not tell failure from success.
AdSense re-review submitted: the last fix was deleting content, not adding it
AdSense rejected the UK Calculators site for low-value content on 10 July. The fix over fourteen days was real hub listings, six verified SVG diagrams, and a quality sweep that removed fabricated trust signals — not more pages. Most remediation write-ups budget for additions; this one ends with a deletion sprint.
The GSC and GA crons failed silently for two weeks. That's a telemetry blindspot, not a cron problem.
The nightly GSC and GA telemetry crons for UK Calculators had been dying every night since 20 June. On 4 July a Saturday morning review found the gap — fourteen days of dark data, no alerts, clean-looking logs. The fix took an afternoon. The monitoring lesson took longer.
Branded card names rot. /work's don't any more.
Two corrections arrived within the same hour: one product had rebranded six months earlier, one client project couldn't be named publicly. Both pointed at the same design gap. Closing it required a policy, not a patch.
The cadence clock resets on zero-draft runs. The publishing schedule is manual rescue.
On 17 July the approval gate worked exactly as designed: the first multi-day autonomous streak since the pipeline launched. By 20 July I was writing another manual rescue. The 14-day cadence clock had reset again.