Work log: Polymathic — March 16, 2026

What shipped today

A cleanup session focused on small but meaningful fixes across search, email signatures, newsletter infrastructure, and the pre-commit hook. Six issues closed, all originating from yesterday’s /scout run.

The search page had a regression from yesterday’s #155 fix — the search index (index.json) outputs category as a singular string, not categories as a plural array. The original fix assumed search used the same ArticleJSON format as per-post JSON output, but they’re two separate systems. #164 reverted the change and search categories display correctly again. The investigation into ArticleJSON (#159) confirmed it’s actively used via a cascade in content/posts/_index.md, not orphaned — closed as won’t fix.

The email signature template had a hardcoded phone number in the tel: href instead of using Hugo’s .Params.phone. The newsletter send script was referencing $0 inside a single-quoted Python heredoc (where it’s literal, not the script path) and falling back to a hardcoded /Users/paul/... path. Both fixed to use dynamic values. The pre-commit hook gained a cleanup trap for its temp directory.

Newsletter edition 15 (“Most of your infrastructure is decoration”) was approved and scheduled for Tuesday March 17 at 11am ET. During the send, discovered that Brevo’s API no longer accepts status=scheduled as a query filter — fixed the script to fetch all campaigns and filter client-side.

Completed

• #155 — Fix search page category display
• #156 — Fix email signature tel: href
• #157 — Fix newsletter-send.sh hardcoded path
• #158 — Add cleanup trap to pre-commit hook
• #159 — Remove orphaned ArticleJSON format (closed: actively used, not orphaned)
• #164 — Fix search category regression from #155

Release progress

• April 2026: 2/3 closed

Carry-over

• Newsletter edition 15 scheduled for Tuesday March 17 at 11am ET (Brevo campaign 31) — monitor delivery
• #112 — Blog dates accuracy (needs-clarification, no human reply yet)

Risks

• The search regression (#155 → #164) highlights that index.json and single.articlejson.json look similar but serve different purposes. Future changes to either JSON format need to check which consumers depend on the field names.

Flags and watch-outs

• Brevo API changed: status=scheduled filter no longer valid. Script updated to filter client-side, but other Brevo integrations may hit the same issue.
• resources/_gen/assets/sass/ files keep showing as modified after Hugo builds — cosmetic git noise, not a real problem.

Next session

• Check Brevo delivery stats for edition 15 (and 13-14 if not already checked)
• #112 — Check if there’s been a reply on the blog dates accuracy issue
• #8 — Product blog syndicated content is the last open April 2026 milestone issue
• Consider running /scout again now that the JSON format confusion is documented
• Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large” (carry-over from March 15)