Posts on Automation.
10 posts tagged "Automation".
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.
Three days, zero publishes, one fix: screen before you draft
The 7-9 July publish gap traced back to a sequencing error: duplication checks running after draft resources had been spent, not before. Moving the coverage screen upstream stopped the backlog compounding. Five articles in the thirteen days since.
Day 4 fired clean triage and shipped nothing: 150 clusters ranked, zero drafts produced
The cron completed triage on 150 clusters at 08:22 on Day 4, surfaced mortgage at a calculator score of 20, and produced nothing. When the triage succeeds and the output is zero, the triage is excluded as a cause. That's the diagnostic the pipeline needed.
Eight clusters triaged, zero published: why autonomous content cadence fails silently
The UK Calculators content pipeline ran three clean cron exits and published nothing for three weekdays. No errors, no alerts, just absence. Three weeks of daily runs showed the failure mode is not bad drafts. It is a gate that rejects everything differently each day, and a cadence monitor that asks the wrong question.
The cron fired at 08:22 and drafted nothing — scheduling is the easy part
On 2 July, the pipeline ran on time, ranked 150 clusters, fetched candidates, and produced zero drafts. The scheduler worked. The grounding step didn't. Automating gov.uk pillar articles forces a distinction that took a zero-drafts morning to make explicit: cron reliability and content freshness are different problems, and only one of them is solved.