Work log: paulos social pipeline

What shipped today

The broken Zapier pipeline that turned blog posts into social media blurbs is now a proper CLI command. paulos social handles the full lifecycle: parse the RSS feed, generate platform-tuned blurbs using the LLM with Paul’s voice guidelines, and push them to Authexis for scheduling. Each step is independently runnable for debugging, or chained with paulos social run for automation.

The interesting engineering problem was character limits. Bluesky (300 chars) and Mastodon (500 chars) have hard ceilings, and those limits apply to the assembled post — content plus URL plus hashtags. LLMs fundamentally cannot count characters, so prompting alone produced ~50% over-limit posts. The fix: generate first, then programmatically measure and re-prompt with an explicit “shorten to N characters” instruction. Nuclear fallback truncates at the last sentence boundary. After that, every post came in under limit.

The blurb generation also surfaced a useful pattern around Authexis’s API design. The v2 social-posts endpoint was concatenating content, source_url, and hashtags into a single content field server-side, which made character budgeting from the caller’s side fragile and error-prone. Filed authexis#748 and it was resolved same-session — the API now stores them as separate fields and lets platform adapters handle assembly.

Completed

• paulos social command group (fetch, generate, push, run –dry-run)
• authexis#748 — social-posts API field separation

Release progress

• March 2026: 10/12 closed

Carry-over

• Social blurbs generated and pushed for “Your biggest problems are the ones running fine” — 4 other unprocessed RSS entries remain
• paulos social run not yet tested end-to-end (individual steps verified)
• Bluesky character limit enforcement could still occasionally miss by a few chars on the shorten retry — worth monitoring

Risks

• Authexis platform adapters need to correctly assemble content + URL + hashtags per platform when publishing. If the adapter logic doesn’t match what we assume (content + \n\n + url + \n\n + hashtags), posts could still exceed limits or look wrong.

Flags and watch-outs

• The AUTHEXIS_SOCIAL_API_KEY is in the local .env — make sure it stays out of git
• VOICE.md dependency: blurb generation reads ~/Projects/polymathic-h/VOICE.md at runtime. If that file moves, generation falls back to a minimal prompt.

Next session

• Run paulos social run end-to-end for remaining 4 unprocessed blog posts
• Verify posts appear correctly in Authexis queue with proper platform assignments
• Test the full pipeline on the server (ssh deploy is done, but need to confirm .env has the key there too)
• Consider adding paulos social to a cron or scheduled trigger for automation