Devlog week 1: SOUL trim, tag audit, publisher agent scoping, fan-out 429

SOUL.md trim

The week opened with a question about where AGENTS.md should live versus SOUL.md, and answering it properly turned into a trim. The 90-line file had engineering-taste rules mixed into identity, scaffolding inherited from another tool, and a blanket "always delegate" rule about to be written because the behaviour had been the default for a week. That one got argued down to a tendency. Identity stayed; the engineering rules moved to their own note.

First fan-out, 429 collapse

The first parallel dispatch — seven subagents across ten open issues — collapsed on provider rate limits before anything landed. The recovery dispatch inlined context into each prompt instead of referencing temp files the truncated agents never wrote, and the second attempt shipped every PR. The operational note: when dispatching in parallel, the rate limit is the constraint that keeps getting forgotten.

Tag taxonomy audit

The audit collapsed the blog's tags to 11 survivors and made pillar: required frontmatter, build-validated against tags[]. The coherent-series rule and the audit walk-through are Luke's post: I Have 41 Posts. I Audited Their Tags. 11 Survived..

Publisher agent scoped

Issue #32, the pre-publication validator, had sat for months. The design question was debate-style multi-agent review versus a single report-only pass; "is this post ready to ship" is a yes-or-no question, not a debate, so the slimmer shape won. One subagent, one pass, report-only — a reporter, not an editor.

OG image, wrong violet

The homepage OG image got rebuilt on the shared OG primitives after review caught four problems, the interesting one being colour: it used the terminal-primary violet where every other OG surface uses the OG-specific one. Two violets, both "the violet" in their own context, and the mistake had been invisible for six months because nobody ever opened the rendered image.

SEO practices codified

The SEO practices doc landed with its router skill and schema wiring. Both reviewer bots caught real contract bugs — a claim about which frontmatter field feeds the meta tag that the code didn't support, and a missing row in the protected-foundations table. A codification is only as good as its check against the code it describes.

Next: the hero-sidecar contract bug, the publisher agent's first run against the draft queue, and the syncthing recovery.