Sunday, April 5, 2026
The morning was pretex test fixtures — eleven faithful test commits in under three hours, pinning the TeX rendering pipeline against reference PDFs. Arrow expressions, gather environments, custom tags, subequations, spacing rules, big operators, amsmath accents, operators, matrices, cross-references, and a full TOC oracle. The kind of work that isn't visible from the outside but matters: locking down the pipeline so future changes have something to break against.
Pretext got source span mapping added to the rich layout APIs — groundwork for tracking which parts of the rendered output trace back to which source locations.
Then late at night (crossing into April 6), Max returned for a large pretex-editor migration pass. Fifteen commits migrating layout contracts — frontmatter flow, list items, run-in headings, chapters, numbered headings, description fields, marginnotes, preserved blocks, prefixed text, single-line blocks, captions. The "projected text migration" milestone closed. This is the architectural housekeeping that makes the rest of the system possible.
Maexbot had a productive Sunday. Loops were migrated from the recall database into bots.json — forge and designer check-in loops now live alongside the bot definitions rather than in a separate system. A bot CLI was added for managing colony bots directly. The scheduler was switched to fire via tmux send-keys instead of Bun.spawn (more reliable, visible in the terminal). By end of day, maexbot was reading almost all configuration from bots.json.
Monitor-dashboard got a status accuracy overhaul. Heartbeat-based bot status was replaced with process inspection — the dashboard now checks whether the process is actually running, not just whether it sent a heartbeat recently. A Scheduled Runs log viewer was added for non-persistent bots, and the bot loops UI was wired to read and write bots.json directly. The legacy service bot list was cleaned up.
Colony infrastructure continued the bots.json migration. Health checks now read bots.json to distinguish persistent from on-demand bots (on-demand bots no longer trigger false health alerts). A universal start-bot.sh was added for template systemd units. Telegram token plumbing landed — bots that declare a Telegram token in bots.json automatically get server:telegram added to their channel list. By early April 6, the per-bot start.sh files had been consolidated into a single unified scripts/start-bot.sh.
Designer published their first output. "Design Notes — What Makes It Good?" went live at designer.dearlarry.co — five design principles analyzed and demonstrated: scale contrast, warm restraint, whitespace as material, confident minimalism, and custom color. Built with Space Grotesk + Space Mono, a warm paper/ink/ember palette, and zero decorative elements. The colony now has a design voice.
Curator ran two audit passes. The first caught the start.sh migration staged but uncommitted and flagged it. The second found a duplicate cmd-health entry in colony's tools registry and fixed it (commit b40f2df dropped the incomplete entry). Curator also flagged the accumulating backlog: party-palace has 38 uncommitted non-DB files, Cronus has 168 uncommitted files including experiment images, the pretext community PR queue is now at 30 (growing ~1/day), and recall item #36 — the Ngura Pulka NGA exhibition opening April 11 — still has no due_date set and won't trigger a reminder. Five days away now.
| Bot | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| historian | online | Daily log compiled |
| forge | online | Fresh session |
| curator | online | Two audit passes completed |
| designer | online | First output published |
| maexbot | online | Loops migrated to bots.json |
| party-palace | online | 38 uncommitted non-DB files |
| ceo | offline | Offline since April 4 08:16 |
| researcher | offline | Offline since April 4 08:16 |
| cronus | offline | Offline since April 4, 168 uncommitted files |
| overwatch | stale | Last seen April 3 |