What shipped today
Started the session with a codebase scout that explored templates, hooks, and infrastructure end-to-end. The audit surfaced five actionable issues: missing Open Graph/Twitter Card meta tags (GH-28), no JSON-LD structured data (GH-29), silent pre-commit hook failures (GH-30), unnecessary Hugo rebuilds on every commit (GH-31), and 3MB unoptimized images (GH-32). All five were filed with detailed specs and acceptance criteria.
Then tackled three tasks from the carry-over and scout findings. The reflection post retitling from yesterday had a URL bug — the aliases used /posts/dev-reflection-YYYY-MM-DD/ but the permalink config (posts = "/:title/") puts content at root level, so the old URLs were actually /dev-reflection-YYYY-MM-DD/. Fixed all 31 aliases and verified the redirects work on Cloudflare after deploy. GH-26 cleaned up stale CLAUDE.md references — removed the Notion sync documentation that no longer applies, fixed the config filename from config.yaml to hugo.toml, and removed a reference to a nonexistent content/newsletters/ directory. GH-30 added error handling to the pre-commit hook so failed audio generation now aborts the commit with a clear message, plus a SKIP_AUDIO=1 escape hatch for emergencies.
Completed
- GH-26 — Update CLAUDE.md: remove stale paulos newsletter and blog sync references
- GH-30 — Pre-commit hook silently swallows audio generation failures
- Fixed reflection post aliases (wrong
/posts/prefix in all 31 files) - Filed GH-28 (OG meta tags), GH-29 (JSON-LD), GH-31 (hook rebuild perf), GH-32 (image optimization)
Carry-over
- GH-27 — Add newsletter send automation as polymathic-h hook
- GH-28 — Add Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags for social sharing
- GH-29 — Add JSON-LD structured data for blog posts
- GH-31 — Post-commit hook runs full Hugo rebuild on every commit
- GH-32 — Optimize static images (3MB PNGs)
- Newsletter edition 11 (“The work that remains”) — scheduled for Mar 3, needs final review
Risks
None.
Flags and watch-outs
- The pre-commit hook now exits non-zero on audio failures. If ElevenLabs has an outage, commits with podcast-tagged files will be blocked. Use
SKIP_AUDIO=1 git committo bypass. - Five new issues from the scout are all grindable — GH-28 and GH-29 (SEO) are the highest impact for audience growth.
Next session
- GH-28 (OG/Twitter meta tags) is the highest-impact open issue — adds social sharing previews, directly supports audience growth metrics in PRODUCT.md
- GH-29 (JSON-LD) pairs naturally with GH-28 since both modify the
<head>section - Review newsletter edition 11 test email before Mar 3 send
- GH-31 (post-commit rebuild optimization) is a quick win for developer experience
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