Work log: Authexis — March 17, 2026

What shipped today

Two themes: briefing pyramid/layering and continued hardening from the grind queue.

The biggest structural work was the briefing pyramid — decomposing #1331 into four child issues and shipping all four. The morning briefing email now has a three-tier information hierarchy instead of flat article/idea/content lists. Tier 1 (“Today’s highlights”) shows the single most important article, idea, and content piece as prominent gold-bordered cards. Tier 2 (“Top picks”) shows the next 2-3 items as compact grouped bullets. Tier 3 remains the existing flat sections for everything else. The implementation touched the full stack: ideas now sort by strength score instead of creation date (#1345), BriefingSlots gained six new tiered fields (#1346), the email template renders the three-tier layout (#1347), and the Claude prompt now identifies the highlight article with a “why this matters” note (#1348). Claude’s pick takes priority over raw ai_score ranking, with fallback to score-based selection.

The grind queue also processed a batch of issues from the previous session’s pipeline. Favicon rendering was fixed — the SVG marks were off-center and had transparent backgrounds that disappeared on dark browser chrome. The homepage metadata got a positioning refresh. The essay drafting system gained a “use text guideposts” toggle for bolding, italics, and subheads. Social post character limits were fixed to check assembled length (body + hashtags + URL). Auto-invite for unregistered workspace members shipped. Four new handler test suites landed. Error boundaries were added to 8 major web sections. SQL injection protection was added via column name whitelists. And the social metrics fetch loop got per-item error isolation.

Completed

• #1331 — Briefing pyramid/layering (decomposed into 4 children, all shipped)
• #1345 — Rank ideas by strength in briefing fetch
• #1346 — Add tiered data structure to BriefingSlots for pyramid layout
• #1347 — Restructure briefing email template for pyramid layout
• #1348 — Update Claude briefing prompt for tiered article grouping
• #1343 — Fix intermittent favicon — consolidate icon strategy and fix SVG
• #1339 — Update homepage hero copy — positioning refresh
• #1336 — Add “use text guideposts” toggle for essay drafting
• #1335 — Fix createSocialPost/updateSocialPost char limit to check assembled length
• #1333 — Auto-invite unregistered users when adding workspace members
• #1326 — Add tests for content_parse_transcript handler
• #1325 — Add tests for article_fetch_content handler
• #1324 — Add tests for content_create handler
• #1323 — Add tests for content_stage_start handler
• #1319 — Add tests for content pipeline handlers — batch 2 (parent, decomposed)
• #1318 — Remove 13 stale test files for non-existent handlers
• #1317 — Add error.tsx boundaries to major feature sections
• #1316 — Add column name whitelist to dynamic SQL UPDATE builders
• #1315 — Add per-item error isolation to social_fetch_metrics batch loop
• #1314 — Fix briefing interval check — SQL LIKE pattern doesn’t match JSON spacing
• #1292 — Fix shortenPost to account for hashtags and URL in assembled length
• #1215 — Add conversational filler phrases to humanizer prompt

Release progress

• v1.5: 1 open / 21 closed (dashboard redesign is the remaining issue — backlogged)
• v2: 0 open / 20 closed (all complete, due 2026-04-01)
• v1-outbound: 0 open / 19 closed (all complete, due 2026-04-14)

Carry-over

• The briefing pyramid is fully implemented but hasn’t been verified with a real briefing generation yet. Need to trigger one for Stacy’s workspace and visually inspect the email.

Risks

• Claude’s highlight_index is parsed from a JSON response with no validation that the index is within the article list bounds. The code handles this (falls back to score-based ranking), but a malformed response could silently downgrade the highlight selection without any logging.

Flags and watch-outs

• The pyramid tier-splitting happens after Claude returns themed sections — it re-flattens the sections to score-rank articles. If Claude groups articles into themes where the #1 article by score ends up not being the most thematically relevant, the Claude highlight pick will override. This is the intended behavior but worth watching in real output.
• v2 and v1-outbound milestones show 0 open issues — may be ready to close.

Next session

• Trigger a test briefing for Stacy’s workspace and verify the pyramid layout renders correctly in the email
• Close v2 and v1-outbound milestones if confirmed complete
• Run /triage --auto to classify any new issues
• Run /scout for the next round of improvements
• Check if the grind queue has new ready-for-dev issues to process