2026-02-27 — Paulos

What shipped today

This was a foundational day. Two major themes: completing the skills refactor that started yesterday, and wiring up the end-to-day content pipeline so it actually works end-to-end.

The skills refactor landed as PR #142 after resolving 16 merge conflicts with Codex’s concurrent work on the same files. The “earns its keep” philosophy is now the canonical product contract — PRODUCT.md was rewritten to reflect it. A /scout pass found 6 post-refactor issues (stale refs, orphaned files, dead config), and /grind ran all 6 in parallel on isolated worktrees. Four shipped clean, one was already resolved, one recovered from a dead agent. PRs #152-#155 all merged.

The second theme was the content pipeline. /close, /sum-up, and /reflect were disconnected — each wrote to or read from slightly different locations, and none of them committed to polymathic-h. Now the pipeline connects: /close writes work logs to both the current repo and polymathic-h/content/work-logs/{project}/, committing and pushing both. /sum-up reads from the canonical polymathic-h location and writes synthesis to content/syntheses/{date}.md. /reflect reads that synthesis, writes a post with a real title, generates ElevenLabs audio with the cloned voice, injects an audio player, commits, pushes, and Cloudflare auto-deploys. One command from synthesis to published podcast.

Along the way: built paulos idea to push content ideas to Authexis via the v1 API (chased down a redirect-stripping-auth-headers bug), wired up Pushover as a notification platform (env var name mismatch: PUSHOVER_API_TOKEN vs PUSHOVER_APP_TOKEN), added PAULOS_DEFAULT_NOTIFIER env var support, and reversed the .claude/ symlink ownership so paulos owns the directory and utilities symlinks into it.

Completed

• #142 — Skills refactor: intent-based skills, earns-its-keep CLI philosophy
• #143 — Fix intent router command mapping (already resolved)
• #144 — Remove stale pm_execute guidance (already resolved by Codex)
• #145 — Sweep skills/docs for stale references to removed command groups
• #148 — Delete orphaned git_branch.py and its test
• #149 — Remove stale config fields and escalation parsing block
• #150 — Fix install_home_server.sh reference to deleted project command
• #151 — Clean stale .claude/ artifacts
• #139 — Add Pushover to notification menu (already implemented)

Carry-over

• #146 — Rewrite README.md (needs human input on scope)
• #147 — Fix PRODUCT.md phantom command references (needs human review)
• #119 — Explore using Authexis content services for blog posts (natural next step after paulos idea)
• Test the full /close → /sum-up → /reflect pipeline end-to-end in a real session

Risks

• The .claude/ symlink between paulos and utilities has been a recurring source of circular references. The current setup (paulos owns, utilities symlinks) should be stable but watch for it on git pull.
• The paulos idea command hits www.authexis.app directly to avoid a redirect that strips auth headers. If Authexis changes its redirect behavior, this could break silently.

Flags and watch-outs

• Authexis has 4 test ideas that need cleanup (from testing paulos idea)
• ElevenLabs voice ID MfTav5s2dmhGtqd47aNF is hardcoded via env var — if the voice gets deleted or regenerated, audio generation will fail silently
• The polymathic-h pre-commit hook and /reflect skill both specify --provider elevenlabs — keep them in sync

Next session

• Run the full EOD pipeline: /close → /sum-up → /reflect and verify the published output
• /prep the eod reflect bug cluster (#133, #134, #135, #136) and batch-grind them
• Pick up #119 (Authexis content services for blog) — extends the paulos idea work
• Consider whether utilities repo should be archived now that .claude/ ownership is settled