Field Notes - Jan 7, '26

Executive Signals

• Approvals are the new latency: safe-path automation, blast-radius guards, rollback rehearsals by default
• State over persona: workflow policies over cosplay agents, simpler governance
• Content has a compiler: CI for taste, structure, security, at velocity
• Docs are changelogs now: commit diffs draft, humans curate voice and context
• Monorepo without the pain: parallel apps, shared configs, isolated secrets, sealed deploys

Marketing

Content CI Kills AI Slop

AI made creation cheap; quality now differentiates. Treat content like code with CI that enforces structure, taste, and safety. Authors write Markdown/MDX, the system checks front matter, style, and allowed components before publish. Keep marketing builds isolated from the app and require previews with maintainers as gatekeepers.

• Fail CI on missing front matter, style violations, or disallowed HTML
• Limit MDX to vetted shortcodes; block raw React and unchecked embeds
• Protect main with CODEOWNERS and preview builds; never expose app secrets

Agents Draft From Commits, Humans Keep the Voice

Docs lag product because drafting is expensive. Point an agent at recent commits and PRs to propose docs, snippets, and release notes. Ship through the same Content CI so structure and safety hold, while humans polish tone and context. Releases get auto-tagged with a human-edited changelog assembled from structured messages.

• Nightly: diff commits, draft MDX, open PRs with previews
• Enforce identical front matter and shortcode rules; zero raw HTML
• Auto-tag releases; assemble human-edited changelogs from structured commits

Product

Policies By Workflow State, Not Persona

Skip character personas. Use a competent generalist model and shift policies by workflow state (Planning, In Progress, Review). Tool access, guardrails, and model choices align with the state of work, not a costume. Pre-approve low-risk planning tasks, and require approvals for transitions that execute code. Log the active policy per state for reproducibility.

• Bind default model, tools, and guardrails to each workflow state
• Pre-approve Planning; require approval on state transitions that run code
• Log policy per state to enable audits and postmortems

Engineering

Pre-Authorize Safe Tasks, Gate the Irreversible

Approval prompts crush throughput. Let agents execute low-risk operations without human clicks and reserve approvals for actions with real blast radius (prod writes, billing, auth, infra). Design for fast rollback so the occasional mistake costs less than perpetual supervision. Track approval friction and widen the safe list as reliability proves out.

• Maintain a safe-tool allowlist; approvals only for irreversible or cross-account actions
• Put time-travel/backups and branch-based deploys behind every write; rehearse recovery weekly
• Monitor approval rate and cycle time; if approvals >5% in a flow, expand the safe list

Add a Website Without Ripping the App Apart

You can get mono-repo benefits without a rewrite. Keep the app intact, add the site alongside it, and isolate blast radius with separate configs and deploy targets. Share linting and type configs at the root for consistency while caching tests and builds to keep CI fast.

• Move app to apps/app; add apps/www and a packages/content workspace
• Separate env files and deploy targets; distinct permissions and secrets per surface
• Share linting/Tailwind/TS configs at the root; cache builds and tests for speed