Work log — 2026-03-01

What shipped today

Today was a focused build-out of the Skopos briefing pipeline, adding three new data sources that make the morning email genuinely useful as a single-pane-of-glass for the day ahead.

PostHog product pulse (#166) landed first — carry-over from yesterday’s session. The Skopos email now shows a cyan “Product pulse” card with key metrics (DAU, total events, sessions) and week-over-week percentage changes. The scanner pulls from the PostHog API with a 7-day rolling window and computes deltas automatically.

Email inbox and calendar scanners were the main event. Issue #167 originally bundled both scanners together, but during prep it was clear that was too big for a single grind cycle — two independent APIs, two rendering cards, two test suites. Decomposed into #169 (email inbox via Fastmail IMAP) and #170 (calendar via ICS feed), each with a detailed implementation spec. Both ground successfully in parallel agents.

The email inbox scanner connects to Fastmail over IMAP using the app password already in .env, fetches unread/flagged counts and the 5 most recent subject lines. The calendar scanner fetches an ICS feed URL, parses it with the icalendar package, and extracts today’s events — handling both all-day and timed events, sorted sensibly. Both render as colored cards in the Skopos email (purple for inbox, pink for schedule) with the same table-based layout pattern established by the product pulse card.

The grind pipeline worked well — two parallel agents in isolated worktrees, each completing dev→QA→review autonomously. Cherry-picking #169 was clean. #170 conflicted heavily (both agents modified the same 6 files), so I aborted the cherry-pick and manually integrated the calendar changes on top of the merged inbox code. All 40 briefing tests and 501 total tests pass.

A sample Skopos email was rendered with all cards populated and sent via Brevo to verify the full pipeline end-to-end. The email looks good — calendar at top, then product pulse, then inbox, then the LLM-generated briefing content.

Completed

• #166 — Surface PostHog metrics as Product pulse in Skopos email
• #167 — Add calendar and email inbox scanners (decomposed into #169 + #170)
• #168 — Name the COS briefing “Skopos”
• #169 — Email inbox scanner (Fastmail IMAP)
• #170 — Calendar scanner (ICS feed)

Carry-over

Nothing from this session — all issues shipped clean.

Risks

• Calendar recurring events: The ICS scanner doesn’t expand RRULE recurrences. Events that repeat daily/weekly won’t appear unless the calendar provider materializes them into individual VEVENT entries in the feed. Most hosted calendars (Google, Fastmail) do this for near-future events, but it’s worth monitoring.
• IMAP connection limits: Fastmail allows limited concurrent IMAP connections. The scanner opens/closes cleanly, but if the briefing runs multiple times in quick succession, connection refusal is possible.

Flags and watch-outs

• The icalendar package was added as a new dependency — first new package addition in a while. It’s mature and well-maintained but worth noting.
• Grind parallel agent merges remain the trickiest part of the pipeline. When agents touch the same files, cherry-pick conflicts are inevitable. The manual integration approach works but doesn’t scale if we’re grinding 5+ issues that all touch the same module.

Next session

• #160 — Background mode for /prep, /exec, and /grind skills: This is the remaining March milestone issue. Investigate what “background mode” means in the context of Claude Code skills and how to implement it.
• #119 — Explore using Authexis content services for blog posts: Lower priority, still on the milestone.
• Consider running a real Skopos briefing (paulos cos briefing) to validate the full pipeline with live data — the sample email used mocks.