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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Work log: Authexis — March 13, 2026

What shipped today

A big polish and resilience day. Eleven issues closed across two sessions, touching both the web frontend and the Python engine. The throughline was making the content pipeline more robust and the content detail page more useful.

The content detail page got four quality-of-life improvements: a Save as PDF button using @media print CSS with EB Garamond serif typography, an Export markdown button, an editable target length field, and removal of the redundant “From idea” metadata in the footer. The PDF export produces clean, presentation-ready documents — a step toward the professional documents capability in the product vision.

On the engine side, the biggest wins were around pipeline resilience. Sequential field generation for the final stage means body generates first, then intro, title, and image can build on what came before — no more titles that don’t match the article. The humanizer got a dedicated short-form prompt for titles and headlines, fixing the problem where essay-length dehumanization patterns were being applied to 5-word titles. Email override was centralized in send_email() so all outbound emails respect it, not just briefings.

Two discoverability improvements: the poll-timeout banner now shows a “Restart stage” button inline (previously hidden in the action panel), and the briefing email’s content counts are now clickable links that filter the content list by status.

Completed

  • #1140 — Fix silent exception handling in briefing_generate handler
  • #1163 — Sequential field generation for final stage
  • #1158 — Skip interview — auto-fill from workspace profile (admin only)
  • #1164 — Centralize email_override in send_email()
  • #1165 — Show and make target length editable on content detail page
  • #1166 — Add Save as PDF and Export markdown buttons
  • #1167 — Stuck stage recovery: restart button in timeout banner
  • #1169 — Short-form humanizer prompt for titles
  • #1171 — Remove “From idea” from content detail footer
  • #1173 — Make briefing email content counts clickable links
  • #1174 — MCP redo/regenerate tool (prepped, ready-for-dev)

Release progress

  • v1.5: 1 open / 11 closed (no due date)
  • v2: 0 open / 20 closed — complete, due 2026-04-01
  • v1-outbound: 0 open / 19 closed — complete, due 2026-04-14

Carry-over

  • Uncommitted email override UI changes on main: web/actions/admin.ts, workspace-detail-client.tsx, workspace-form.tsx, engine/uv.lock. These add email_override controls to the admin workspace detail page. Need review and commit.
  • #1174 (MCP redo_content_field tool) — prepped and labeled ready-for-dev, not yet implemented.

Risks

  • The email override UI changes sitting uncommitted on main could cause merge conflicts if other work touches those files.

Flags and watch-outs

  • v1.5 has 1 remaining open issue (#743 — dashboard redesign, backlog). May want to close the milestone if dashboard redesign is deferred.
  • #1176 (engine sweep for stuck stages) is ready-for-prep — this is the automated counterpart to the manual restart button shipped in #1167.

Next session

  1. Ship the uncommitted email override UI changes (review the diff, commit, push)
  2. /issue exec 1174 --auto — implement the MCP redo_content_field tool
  3. /issue prep 1176 --auto — spec the engine sweep for stuck stages
  4. /issue prep 1178 --auto — spec the information pyramid format for notifications
  5. Consider closing v1.5 milestone if #743 is truly backlog

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