Work log: Polymathic — March 29, 2026

What shipped today

The dev queue got its first real workout. The /scout scan from yesterday’s session created five issues; today’s /dev-loop ticks knocked out two of them. The dead poly3 theme directory — a leftover from the February cleanup that git forgot — was removed from disk and CODEBASE.md. More substantively, all three git hooks (pre-commit, post-commit, install.sh) were hardened with set -euo pipefail, proper grep guards for set -e compatibility, and warning logs replacing the silent || true patterns that were swallowing notification failures. The install script also gained git-dir validation and hooks-dir creation, plus its echo text was updated from the old “podcast-tagged posts” language.

Two new essays landed. Paul wrote “AI and the Götterdämmerung of Work” — a major piece drawing on Nietzsche, Leibniz, Arendt, Heidegger, and Wagner to argue that AI exposes (rather than defeats) the industrial model of work. It was published, voiced via OpenAI TTS (8:36, 3 chunks), and scheduled as newsletter #17 for Tuesday March 31 at 11am ET (Brevo campaign 33). The Unicode slug issue was caught during newsletter testing — Hugo rendered the URL with götterdämmerung but the newsletter script expected ASCII, so an explicit url: frontmatter field was added. The second essay, “Stop Lending Your Watch to a Consultant,” was formatted as a draft post with section headings and frontmatter — Paul’s content, not yet published.

Completed

• #245 — Remove dead poly3 theme
• #244 — Harden error handling in git hooks (pre-commit, post-commit, install.sh)
• Published “AI and the Götterdämmerung of Work” with podcast audio
• Newsletter #17 scheduled (Brevo campaign 33, March 31 11am ET)
• “Stop lending your watch to a consultant” formatted as draft post

Release progress

• April 2026: 0/3 open (all closed)

Carry-over

• #242 — Fill missing tags on 53 published posts (ready-for-dev)
• #243 — Archive or triage 70 legacy drafts (ready-for-prep)
• #246 — paulos blog idea returns Authexis API 404 (ready-for-prep)
• Three draft posts in working tree: monads-are-immutable-code.md, the-monad-cracks.md, rent-seeking-inside-organizations.md (Paul says not written yet)
• “Stop lending your watch to a consultant” draft ready for Paul’s review before publishing
• #112 — Blog dates accuracy still waiting on human reply

Risks

• The Götterdämmerung post required an explicit url: slug because Hugo’s default slug preserved Unicode characters (götterdämmerung) which broke the newsletter script’s path lookup. Any future post with non-ASCII characters in the title will need the same treatment.

Flags and watch-outs

• Newsletter #17 goes out Tuesday March 31 at 11am ET. Confirm delivery stats after send.
• Apple Podcasts search rankings should be checkable now (~48 hours since the March 28 metadata/transcript changes).
• Confirm newsletter 16 delivery stats (was scheduled Mar 24, still unchecked).
• Check Brevo delivery stats for editions 13-15.
• Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large” (carried over from March 28).

Next session

• Check Apple Podcasts search rankings for the keywords that were invisible (philosophy, human experience terms)
• Confirm newsletter 16 and 17 delivery stats
• Run /dev-loop to pick up #242 (fill missing tags on 53 posts) — highest-impact remaining issue for podcast discoverability
• Check Brevo delivery stats for editions 13-15
• Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large”
• Review “Stop lending your watch to a consultant” draft when Paul is ready to publish
• #112 — Blog dates accuracy still waiting on human reply