[jamierthompson]

What changed

The site had three content types. It now has two.

experiments was chosen before any content existed, to serve a promise the site no longer makes — that everything here arrives with proof. Its collection, schema, and routes are gone; its two entries are essays. Alongside that, the way entries introduce and link each other was reworked, and a set of presentation gaps that only show up on a first public share were closed.

Why

The content model was a hand-picked fixture. Three categories sampled from where the author thought to look, before the space was explored, which then shaped the writing to fit them. Only one of the two entries was ever an experiment: sweeps-vs-fixed-seeds opened by calling itself a worked case and closed with "Three rules", the same shape as the essays. The eval is a real eval, but its 7/7 denominator was never recorded, it ran once per cell, and the author graded his own tool — so it is an essay about an eval.

The schema went with the routes rather than waiting unregistered: a collection over an empty directory warns on every build, and the shape it encoded — hypothesis, status, started, concluded — was built for the retired model. The first real experiment deserves a shape built for what it needs.

Every link outside the hub sat in the furniture. Measured from source: each satellite entry's links fell in its first tenth or last tenth — an orienting sentence at the top, a pointer at the bottom, nothing where a reader actually is. Exactly one link in the corpus sat at the claim it supported, and it was the only edge joining two entries that were not a mechanical pair. Five entries opened with the same sentence word for word, which is what made it read as furniture and get skipped by the reader it existed to orient.

Eight links moved to the sentences that need them; six links pointing at a target their own entry had already linked are gone; every closer that restated a relationship became a bare pointer.

How it was tested

Full gate green on every commit: format:check, astro check (0 errors / 0 warnings / 0 hints), 186 unit tests, 35 Playwright E2E. Each of the five commits builds standalone.

QA log

Six independent review passes ran against this branch. Findings and their resolution:

Redirects for the retired URLs — raised, fixed, then withdrawn. Three /experiments/* URLs were live and listed in the live sitemap, so retiring the collection would 404 them. vercel.json redirects were added — and a reviewer proved they matched none of the three, because Vercel compiles each source to an anchored regex and, with trailingSlash unset, does not normalize the request first. The live URLs all carried a trailing slash. Verified by compiling the config with @vercel/routing-utils, the library Vercel uses. The corrected version covered every form. The redirects were then removed entirely — the site has never been shared and has no inbound links, so this was machinery for a risk that does not exist.

Internal links were unguarded. Nothing in the suite checked that an internal link resolves to a page the build emitted — on a branch deleting routes and rewiring twenty links. e2e/internal-links.spec.ts now reads dist/ once and fails on a dangling href or a wikilink rendered as unwritten. Mutation-tested both ways. A follow-up pass caught that it treated directories as assets, so a slashless link passed for the wrong reason; it now resolves through routes.

A test could not observe this branch's central change. extractInternalLinkTargets's "unknown paths" case used /about/, which the pattern refuses for having no id segment — so it never reached the collection alternation. Narrowing that alternation from three collections to two was invisible to 185 passing tests; widening it to accept any collection also passed. The added case is entry-shaped and two-segment. Mutation-tested: it is the only assertion in 186 that catches a widened pattern.

Two comments described a schema the same branch had deleted, in README.md and src/lib/references.ts. Both removed. A separate audit found three more comments that would rot — a live link count, an enumeration of the collections, a reference to a nonexistent /about/ page — plus two public roadmap pledges in the essays. All cut.

Prose accuracy. A reviewer found the eval's evidence paragraph pointed at "the source repo" with no antecedent, where the nearest candidate was the wrong repository. Fixed, then cut further.

British spelling: zero instances, verified two ways across all content, tests, and config — a ~90-term targeted list and a suffix sweep.

Notes

public/robots.txt is new — the sitemap was generated and advertised to nobody. The favicon was the Astro scaffold logo and is now the site's own mark. Nine of fourteen descriptions ran past the length a search snippet keeps; all now fit. Enforcing that budget in the schema is #14.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
jamiethompson.dev	Ready	Preview	Aug 10, 2026 8:45pm