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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

What shipped today

No code changes to paulos today. The session was a planning and workflow discussion focused on how to increase development velocity across the portfolio, particularly on Authexis.

The core insight: the current single-tab workflow creates a bottleneck where the main Claude agent gets consumed by grind supervision (monitoring sub-agents, merging PRs, handling failures), leaving no bandwidth for higher-value design conversations. We designed a two-tab workflow to fix this:

  • Tab 1 (grind supervisor): Runs /grind autonomously — spawns agents, merges results, keeps going. Stateless and heads-down.
  • Tab 2 (design partner): Conversational — discuss architecture, run /scout and /prep, review specs, plan features.

The handoff between tabs is GitHub issues — tab 2 creates and preps issues, tab 1 grinds them. No shared context needed because the issue body is the complete work packet. This validates the /prep investment: if issues are self-contained, agents don’t need massive context windows.

Also confirmed the EOD publish pipeline works end-to-end for a second consecutive day (5 work logs → synthesis → podcast → 7 files pushed to polymathic-h). Apple Podcasts still showing wrong cover art despite the ?v=2 cache buster — may need a filename change.

Completed

No issues closed today.

Carry-over

None for paulos specifically.

Risks

None.

Flags and watch-outs

  • Apple Podcasts cover art still wrong — may need to change the image filename rather than just cache-busting the URL
  • Branch mode for grind agents still broken (ships to main despite config) — matters more now with two-tab workflow
  • February 2026 milestone complete, no March milestone created yet

Next session

  • Create March 2026 milestone for paulos
  • Run /scout to seed the new milestone with issues from the cleaner post-marketing-removal codebase
  • Fix branch mode so grind agents actually use feature branches — this is more urgent now with the two-tab workflow where design tab may be editing files while grind tab runs
  • Evaluate whether the two-tab workflow (tested on Authexis today) revealed any paulos tooling gaps

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