Work log: Polymathic — March 6, 2026

What shipped today

Brand refresh and newsletter rename

Renamed the newsletter from “The work of being” (which conflicted with the book title) to “Philosopher at Large” across all touchpoints: landing page, footer, homepage hero, email templates (both newsletter and confirmation), and the “first appeared in” note on blog posts. Updated the Synaxis tagline to “AI for execution. Humans for judgment.” in both the synaxis and authexis email signatures. Changed the heading color from cold near-black (#1a0f0f) to the warm wordmark brown (#3D2B1F) so post titles, teaser titles, and nav links match the brand palette. Redacted a prospect name from “The first real user breaks everything.”

Scout and grind: template hardening (GH-51, GH-52, GH-53)

A scout run (likely from another session) identified three template issues, all shipped today:

• GH-51: Fixed brand auto-linking in brand-links.html so existing anchor tags don’t get nested inside generated links — which would produce invalid HTML and break click targets.
• GH-52: Scoped the ArticleJSON output format to posts section only, preventing Hugo strict builds from panicking when non-post pages lack expected frontmatter fields.
• GH-53: Hardened the search UI against reflected XSS by escaping user input in both the header search dropdown and the /search/ page results rendering.

Newsletter workflow discussion

Confirmed the current newsletter workflow: write a post with newsletter: frontmatter metadata, then run paulos newsletter send to create and schedule the Brevo campaign. No changes made — just context recovery for the next session.

Completed

• #51 — Fix brand auto-linking so existing links do not render as nested anchors
• #52 — Scope ArticleJSON output so strict Hugo builds stop panicking
• #53 — Escape search UI rendering to close reflected XSS in /search and header search

Release progress

• March 2026: 7/7 closed (plus 3 more closed today outside the milestone)
• April 2026: 0/1 closed (GH-8: syndication, parked)

Carry-over

• Stale worktrees (agent-a467dc04, agent-ac8f8dca) still need cleanup
• Social slot changes to apply in Authexis (user doing manually)
• paulos#181 (synthesis content_type in /sum-up) — open in paulos repo
• Update Brevo sender name / list name to “Philosopher at Large” (external)

Risks

• None

Flags and watch-outs

• Apple Podcasts artwork — still unverified (carrying since March 3)
• Edition 12 newsletter stats — still unchecked in Brevo
• CF Pages build time — still unverified whether resources/_gen/ commit helped
• Newsletter edition 13 due ~March 10 (Tuesday) — no draft started yet

Next session

• Check Apple Podcasts artwork (day 4 of carrying this)
• Check edition 12 stats in Brevo
• Check CF Pages build time on recent deploys
• Clean up stale worktrees
• Start thinking about edition 13 content (due March 10)
• Update Brevo sender/list name to “Philosopher at Large”