Work log: Polymathic — March 11, 2026

What shipped today

Nine issues closed in a single session — the largest batch execution day yet. The session opened with triaging five issues from yesterday’s scout pass, then moved straight into sequential execution. The work fell into three themes: accessibility, content hygiene, and infrastructure hardening.

Accessibility got three improvements that had been flagged by the previous scout: a skip-to-content link for keyboard navigation (#78), aria-expanded state and focus management on the mobile hamburger menu (#77), and the RSS feed description now checks frontmatter before falling back to Hugo’s .Summary (#76). These are invisible to most visitors but matter for screen reader users and podcast apps that parse the feed.

Content hygiene cleaned up accumulated cruft across multiple scout passes. Four posts had empty coverimage: '' fields with wrong casing — removed. Two stale drafts (one from 2017, one a year-old AI-generated bookmark placeholder) were deleted. A duplicate 2.1MB m4a file and an unreferenced CV PDF were removed from static/files/, saving ~2.3MB of repo bloat. And dead CSS files from the old pre-Hugo-Pipes build system were deleted.

Infrastructure got two targeted fixes: security headers (X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy) added to the Cloudflare Pages _headers file, and the installed git hooks were re-synced with source after the post-commit hook had gone stale. A stale .gitignore entry for a long-deleted mp4 was also cleaned up.

A third scout pass ran mid-session, creating issues #85-#89 which were then triaged and executed in the same session. Issue #88 (stale media files) needed prep first — investigation revealed two of the four files were actively linked from a published post, so only the unreferenced duplicate and orphaned CV were deleted.

Completed

• #76 — Fix RSS feed description to check frontmatter before .Summary
• #77 — Add aria-expanded and focus management to mobile menu
• #78 — Add skip-to-content link for keyboard navigation
• #80 — Clean up stale .gitignore entry and verify node_modules is ignored
• #85 — Re-install git hooks — installed post-commit is stale
• #86 — Remove stale static/css/ files superseded by Hugo Pipes
• #87 — Add security headers to Cloudflare Pages _headers file
• #88 — Remove 7.7MB of stale media files from static/files/
• #89 — Clean up 4 empty coverimage fields and 2 stale draft posts

Release progress

• March 2026: 7/7 closed (complete — milestone can be closed)
• April 2026: 0/1 closed (#8 syndicated content, backlogged)

Carry-over

• Edition 13 delivery stats still need checking in Brevo (campaign 29)
• Edition 14 delivery stats need checking (campaign 30)
• Brevo sender/list name still needs manual update to “Philosopher at Large”
• Apple Podcasts artwork CDN refresh — carrying since March 3
• ai-aint-just-for-coding.md is a draft post in the repo — needs publish decision
• today-i-got-the-bots-to-talk-to-each-other.md — another untracked draft post, needs publish decision

Risks

• Security headers deployed — verify after Cloudflare build with curl -I https://www.paulwelty.com/ that X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options appear
• The AI-DIVE talk post (think-bigger-unknown-use-cases-in-genai) links to files that remain in static/files/ — verify those links still work after deploy

Flags and watch-outs

• The ready-for-dev queue is empty again. Only backlogged issues remain (#8, #79).
• CODEBASE.md is still untracked — decision pending on whether to gitignore or maintain it
• March 2026 milestone is fully closed but the milestone itself is still open — close it next session
• Two untracked draft posts sitting in the working tree (ai-aint-just-for-coding.md, today-i-got-the-bots-to-talk-to-each-other.md)

Next session

1. Close the March 2026 milestone (/milestone --close)
2. Verify security headers live: curl -I https://www.paulwelty.com/
3. Verify AI-DIVE talk post links still work after deploy
4. Check edition 13+14 delivery stats in Brevo
5. Decide on draft posts: publish ai-aint-just-for-coding.md? Publish or hold today-i-got-the-bots-to-talk-to-each-other.md?
6. Run /scout to replenish the issue queue — ready-for-dev is empty
7. Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large” (manual dashboard step)