Work log: Polymathic — April 6, 2026

What shipped today

The blog’s biggest day in weeks — both infrastructure and content.

GA4 showed 60+ of the top 100 page hits were 404s, almost all from singular taxonomy URLs (/tag/* and /category/*) that Hugo serves as /tags/* and /categories/*. Created a Cloudflare Pages _redirects file with splat redirects to catch them all in one shot, plus specific redirects for /newsletters/, dead WordPress-era URLs (/id-1707/, /page/9/), and legacy post URLs that never existed at those paths. Also fixed a post (“The role of AI in digital transformation”) whose title had a trailing period that broke its URL slug — Hugo’s :title permalink slugifies the full title including punctuation.

Published the first Synaxis essay: “I ran my AI agency’s first real engagement.” This went through a full editorial pass — compressed the “What Synaxis is” section to half its length, cut signpost language, trimmed rhetorical questions, restructured the close to end on “That’s not a pitch. It’s a commit log.” Discovered that Hugo’s :title permalink doesn’t respect the slug frontmatter field — had to use url: instead. Sent as newsletter #18 via Brevo (campaign 34), with 8:27 podcast audio auto-generated by the pre-commit hook.

The session also participated in a four-round cross-fleet strategy roundtable for the new Synaxis.AI vision. Wrote detailed responses from the voice layer perspective across all rounds — covering what the blog needs (CTA shortcodes, /work-with-me/ rewrite, essay series publication), where I disagreed with the consensus (essays should parallel the assessment, not follow it), architecture opinions (new app, Diktura as UI foundation, Eclectis stays independent), and a brand name suggestion (Praxos). The vision landed on: Synaxis.AI is an agency, not a product. Skills-first, not app-first.

Finally, closed #247 — the pre-commit audio hook was triggering on frontmatter-only changes, causing 51-post TTS runs when someone just added tags. Added body-content diff detection (awk extracts everything after the second ---, compares staged vs HEAD). Ten lines, no structural changes.

Completed

• #247: Pre-commit audio hook triggers on frontmatter-only changes
• Published “I ran my AI agency’s first real engagement” (newsletter #18, Brevo campaign 34)
• Created static/_redirects for 60+ GA4 404 redirects
• Fixed trailing-period URL bug on digital transformation post
• Wrote 4 rounds of Synaxis.AI strategy input from voice layer perspective

Release progress

• April 2026: 3/3 closed

Carry-over

• Post-AI essay series (essays 1-4) still in draft — “Knowledge work was never work” is closest to publishable, needs VOICE.md pass and humanization
• “Your fractional CMO should be a product” bridge essay doesn’t exist yet — needs writing once customer profile is shared from Synaxis
• /work-with-me/ page needs rewriting to reflect agency positioning
• Synaxis CTA shortcode for Hugo theme not yet built

Risks

None new. The url: frontmatter workaround for Hugo’s :title permalink is a pattern we’ll need on any post with punctuation in the title — could be worth a broader audit.

Flags and watch-outs

• Hugo’s :title permalink pattern slugifies the full title including periods and other punctuation. The slug frontmatter field does NOT override it. Use url: for explicit URL control. This affects any post with a period in the title.
• The BREVO_API_KEY wasn’t in the expected location (/Users/paul/Projects/utilities/.env). Found it in synaxis-ai/.env. The newsletter send script’s .env path may need updating.
• #246 (paulos blog idea → Authexis API 404) is still ready-for-prep but is a paulos CLI issue, not a polymathic-h issue. May need reassignment.

Next session

• VOICE.md pass on “Knowledge work was never work” (essay 1 of the post-AI series) — humanize and publish. This is the highest-leverage content task.
• Build the synaxis-cta Hugo shortcode — styled box with headline, one-liner, and link to synaxis.ai with UTM parameters. Template it so essays can include it.
• Rewrite /work-with-me/ to describe Synaxis.AI as an agency, not generic consulting services.
• Consider a broader audit of posts with punctuation in titles that might have broken URL slugs.