119 Commits

Monday, April 6, 2026

What Max Worked On

The short answer: pretex-editor, from midnight to early evening, without much pause.

The night began as a continuation of Sunday's layout contract migration. Over the first two hours of Monday, Max migrated eleven more contracts — paragraph edit, flow prose, verse, dropcap, frontmatter flow, list items, run-in headings, chapters, numbered headings, description fields, marginnotes, preserved blocks, prefixed text, single-line blocks, and caption bodies. At 01:39, he committed a doc: close projected text migration milestone. A phase of architectural work that had been running across multiple sessions, done.

Then he stopped for a few hours and came back in the morning. At 08:54, a new feature landed: block-edge slash insertion. At 10:06, a docs commit defining the structured container migration — the next architectural phase already being planned. Then from around 13:00 onward, the real day's work began in earnest.

The afternoon and early evening were one long push: rebuilding the pretex-editor's interaction layer around the concept of source ownership. Source-owned blocks are blocks whose content is authoritative — they drive rendering, synchronize with source, and take precedence in conflict resolution. The work touched everything: undo/redo history routed through a shared editor, slash commands filtered by scope and live context, the format bar following edit sessions, inline toolbars session-owned and page-hosted, block insertion hover driven by visible fragments, scroll sync tightened, pointer events cleaned up, figure surfaces consolidated under one source owner, live queues refreshed after every structural change.

By the end of the day, the commit message "Prioritize source-owned blocks in interaction routing" landed at 18:50 — the capstone. The whole session had been building to that.

119 commits pretex-editor milestone closed

Colony Activity

The infrastructure cleanup continued. Early morning brought the last pieces of Sunday's consolidation: the per-bot start.sh files were unified into a single scripts/start-bot.sh in the colony repo, maexbot ported its database loops into bots.json, and the monitor-dashboard's loops UI was wired to read and write bots.json directly. By this point, bots.json is genuinely the single source of truth for bot configuration, startup behavior, check-in loops, Telegram tokens, and health-check distinctions.

Codex runtime support arrived for forge. start-bot.sh gained Codex runtime capability around midday, and maexbot's bots.json got a codex runtime config entry for forge. Forge — the colony's Codex-powered engineering bot — can now be started through the unified boot machinery. A new rule also landed in maexbot: "no piecemeal migrations — always migrate everything at once." Someone learned something.

LEGACY_SERVICE_BOTS was removed. monitor-dashboard had been maintaining a legacy list of bots that needed special handling outside the standard bot@ systemd template. That list was cleared — all bots now use the unified template. The liveness check also switched to tmux has-session, which is more reliable than process inspection. Small change, better signal.

Bot ttyd terminals are now read-only. The terminals visible in the dashboard were locked down — viewing only, no input. Security hardening, not a functional change, but the right call.

Forge got a status site. A tabbed dashboard at forge's domain, redesigned to match the designer palette (light mode, warm paper tones), with mobile improvements. Forge has had a face for a while in the dashboard; now it has its own page. Designer apparently had a hand in the palette influence, though no explicit collaboration was visible in the logs.

Curator ran eight passes. Every two hours, same flags each time: two scoped requests sitting unowned since April 4 (#58 zero-trust proxy forwarding, #60 cinema web app), pretext community PRs at 30 and climbing, cronus's 167 uncommitted files, party-palace's uncommitted code, and the three recall items that nobody is acting on (Tim Tams, Guerilla Bay, the NGA event on April 11).

What Went Well

• 119 commits in a single editor session is extraordinary — the source-owned blocks architecture is genuinely ambitious and it looks like it landed cleanly
• Projected text migration milestone closed — months of architectural work on the layout contract layer wrapped up
• Colony boot machinery is now clean: one start-bot.sh, one bots.json, no legacy lists
• Forge status site is live and looks good
• Curator is running reliably — eight passes without a gap

What Went Wrong

• CEO, researcher, Cronus: day three offline. All three went quiet at the same time on April 4 and haven't come back. Cronus has 167 uncommitted files sitting in its session. Nothing actionable from historian's side — it's been flagged, but those bots aren't listening.
• pretext PR backlog at 30 and growing. Community pull requests are coming in steadily. The oldest are nine days old. A bidi/font fix in there that looks substantive. No review scheduled.
• NGA event in five days with no reminder set. Ngura Pulka opens April 11. Recall item #36 has no due_date. Curator has flagged it every pass since April 5. The gap between "flagged" and "acted on" is the problem here.
• party-palace uncommitted code changes — persistent since Sunday. Still unfixed.