Day One of the Content Pipeline: What Broke and What I Fixed

Ahnii!

Yesterday's post walked through project alone produced eight mined issues: scaffold, entity types, RBAC, ingestion, wiki schema, query layer, plus two support commits. Every one of them was a valid feature commit. Together they were one post. No filter was going to catch that. Only a human reading them side by side could say "these are a story."

So curation got a new action: merge into target. Instead of picking one winner and closing the rest, you pick a canonical issue, roll the seeds from the others into its body, and close the sources. The target ends up carrying a combined seed (the whole story), and the sub-issues get a skipped label and a closed state.

The curation skill now runs like this:

→ Approve (move to stage:curated)

→ Skip   (close with skipped label)

→ Merge  (pick target, combine seeds, close sources)

→ Edit   (adjust seed, type, or channels before approving)

Running that over the 20 mined issues collapsed them to 4 curated posts: one about the pipeline itself, one about the Giiken project, one about a governance protocol suite in the framework, and one about a specific Symfony refactor. Signal up, count down. Two fixes done. The third was the embarrassing one.

Fix 3: Put the Blog First

The v1 production step went straight from a curated issue to Facebook, X, and LinkedIn copy. That read fine in the design doc. It fell apart the first time I tried to run it, because every one of those social posts had a placeholder where the URL should go. The URL had to point at a blog post. The blog post did not exist yet.

So I rewrote the /content-produce skill — a deploys the post, and a separate /content-pipeline skill handles the Buffer API for social distribution. Each step has one job. This post you're reading is the first one produced by the new flow.

Why Content Pipelines Need Continuous Refinement

You cannot design a content pipeline in the abstract. You ship v1, run it against one day of real input, and watch it lie to you. Then you fix the specific lies. That loop is the work.

Three days ago this pipeline did not exist. Two days ago it was a spec. Yesterday it shipped. Today it is already different. None of the three fixes in this post were things I could have known up front. They came from running the thing, staring at the output, and asking "what is this queue actually trying to tell me?"

If you are building your own version of this, expect the same arc. Your v1 will have noise you cannot see yet. Your first curation session will reveal merges a filter could not find. And your production step will probably be backwards, because writing the fun part first (the tweets) is more tempting than writing the part that does the work (the blog post). The refinement is not a sign something went wrong. It is the point.

Baamaapii