Each entry records one release cycle: what changed in the content and its assessments, what changed in how the site is built and checked, what was found broken and where it was fixed, and the lesson the cycle left behind. Newest first.
v0.5 — The map doubles, and the evidence base gets its first honest count
The widest content release the Institute has made: 83 new briefs commissioned from an external review of where the corpus was silent, 36 expansions folded into briefs that already existed, a fifth research programme published, and the citation ledger the production server ran in September committed as the build's input. The topic map moves to the front page, because it is the thing everything else is a view onto.
- Content. 83 new briefs. An external research review produced a longlist of candidate topics the corpus did not own; every candidate it marked as needing its own treatment was commissioned and written. The map goes from 235 slots to 318 and from 212 published briefs to 295, adding roughly 450,000 words and 7,000 flagged claims. The additions are deliberately unglamorous: screening infrastructure, qualification queues, metrology, repair fleets, chokepoints, test capacity. That is where the review found the silence.
- Content. 36 expansions into existing briefs, under a rule enforced by machine: an expand pass may add and sharpen and may never lose a flagged claim or a cited source. A new checker compares every edited record against a byte snapshot taken before the pass and fails on any loss. Twenty-nine briefs grew, none shrank.
- Content. Programme P-002, Ring Gates and Higher Dimensions, is published — wormhole solutions in general relativity, the energy-condition problem, compactified dimensions from Kaluza-Klein to braneworlds, and a layer-by-layer audit of the fiction against known physics. It was the last programme on the roadmap still marked planned; the planned grid is now empty, and it emptied itself, because a programme's status is derived from whether its pages exist.
- Correction. The verification ledger, run over all 4,272 external URLs from the production server, is committed as the build's input: 3,512 verified outright and 391 more resolving to the work at a recorded new location. Because the expansion added roughly a thousand sources that no live check has yet touched, the published verification share lands at 61 percent rather than the 72 percent the ledger alone would have given — a number that went down because the corpus grew, and is printed that way rather than deferred until it flatters.
- Content. The topic map is promoted to the front page, directly beneath the masthead, with its own panel: slots mapped, briefs published, words of flagged analysis, flagged claims. Every figure in it is computed at build time.
- Architecture. Three more written-down copies deleted. The ten category slot lists were Python literals that the expansion silently falsified — the build reported ten count mismatches on the first run — and now load from the taxonomy record, which is the same fix v0.4 applied to the briefs one file over. The site index was a hand-maintained list of every URL that did not know about the 88 pages this release adds, and is now derived from the routes the build produces. The sharded citation record and the programme records were manual export steps that went stale twice in one session, and are now build stages.
- Correction. The annual essay's authored prose carried three superlatives about its own corpus — which category is most established, which is most contested, and whether energy is the only category whose constraints are industrial rather than institutional. The expansion falsified all three at once. They are now computed, and the third turns out to be a real finding the old wording concealed: five of the ten categories are constrained more by factories, feedstocks and capital than by institutions.
- Verification. The build runs eleven checks now, and two new authoring gates run per file before a record is ever integrated: one validates a new brief's whole contract, the other enforces the no-loss rule on expansions. Both are negative-controlled.
Found broken
- v0.4.1 — the ledger release — was packaged and verified but never deployed; its contents are folded into this release rather than shipped separately, the same way v0.2.1 folded into v0.3. A packaged artifact that never reached production is recorded here rather than quietly dropped.
A corpus that grows faster than its own descriptions will falsify them. Everything that broke in this release broke that way: the slot map, the site index, the shard set, the essay's own superlatives. The answer is the same one v0.4 reached and this release had to apply four more times — derive it at build time, or gate it against its source, but never write it down twice.
v0.4 — One corpus, an honest citation record, and the first synthesis products
The structural release. The second copy of the corpus is deleted — brief content now lives in exactly one place, as data — and the citation record is rebuilt from the current corpus with its verification state published rather than implied. Three synthesis products ship: the Constraint Atlas, the Decisive Experiments Index, and State of the Frontier 2026, alongside this change record itself.
- Architecture. The generator's embedded copy of all 212 briefs — 29,479 lines — is deleted; both builds now read the same per-brief data files. Proven byte-identical before and after by tree hash, which was the parity checker's final job before its retirement.
- Correction. The citation record was stale: derived once and never re-derived while the deepening rounds changed what the corpus cites. Rebuilt from the current corpus — 5,389 sources, up from 4,614 — with a ledger accounting for every prior id: 4,535 kept, 79 moved with redirects at their old URLs, none lost.
- Correction. A merge defect found during the rebuild: author styling on 'et al.' made five unrelated 2026 papers fold into one record. Fixed in the corpus (53 reading-list entries de-styled) and at the mechanism (the title extractor now skips degenerate titles), and the fix is negative-controlled.
- Verification. The citation gate gains a ninth check — shard bijection: every source the corpus cites has a record page, every record page is cited by at least one brief, and the search index and redirect map agree with both. Negative-controlled in all four failure directions. This is the check whose absence let the record go stale.
- Verification. A depth gate now blocks any release that loses a flagged claim or lets a deepened brief regress below its floors — the mechanical form of the standing directive that the depth of content is the objective.
- Content. Verification honesty: the citation index now states plainly how many sources have had their links re-checked live, rather than leaving the number implied. At this release that is 387 of 5,389 — 7.2%. Publishing an unflattering number beats implying a flattering one.
- Synthesis. Constraint Atlas: the 496 non-research constraints named across 164 workback plans, derived from the corpus at every build so it cannot go stale. Its headline: 55% of what blocks the frontier is institutional, against 12% that is missing science.
- Synthesis. Decisive Experiments Index: for each of 212 briefs, the one result the brief says would most change its assessment, quoted verbatim and machine-checked against the brief. Its headline: 173 of the decisive tests are unscheduled — possible, and unfunded.
- Synthesis. State of the Frontier 2026: the first annual synthesis essay, written from the corpus and its derived measurements.
- Synthesis. This change record: revisions become a first-class entity, so what changed — including what was found broken — is published rather than buried in build tooling.
Every defect this cycle had one shape: something derived was written down, and then drifted from what it was derived from. v0.4's answer is structural — delete the second copy where possible, and where a derived artifact must exist, gate it against its source.
v0.3.2 — The browser becomes a gate
A fix release for the two v0.3.1 production defects, shipped with the check that would have caught them: a headless-browser gate that loads the site's pages, fails on any uncaught error, and types real queries into the search box asserting real results. Packaging now refuses a build that does not work in a browser.
- Correction. Search restored. Three plausible fixes failed before the working one; the fix that held moves the search import to a native inline script the build tool cannot rewrite.
- Correction. The brief-page script error fixed at the mechanism, not just the instance: a build-time check now refuses TypeScript syntax in any inline script, alongside the runtime fix.
- Verification. Browser-level verification added as a packaging precondition: twelve pages loaded in a headless browser, zero uncaught errors tolerated, three search queries typed and asserted against their results. Verified against the broken v0.3.1 build, which it fails in seven places.
- Correction. The deploy runbook's rollback procedure was found to be a no-op — its search-and-replace pattern could never match the live config it was meant to roll back, because the runbook was itself produced by find-and-replace over its predecessor. Rewritten version-agnostic, with a guard that fails loudly, and a checker added that validates every future deploy brief against the release it ships with.
Found broken
- The deploy brief shipped with four documentation defects, all found by the deploy agent: the rollback no-op, a gate count that disagreed with its own table, a wrong expected-root value, and a hard-coded browser path that fails on any other machine.
A check you haven't run is a guess with authority. The browser gate exists because five passing gates measured that files were delivered, not that they worked; the brief checker exists because the runbook was derived from its predecessor and drifted.
v0.3.1 — The Astro migration ships — with two defects the gates never saw
The site's shipped form moved from a hand-assembled page tree to an Astro build: 306 pages, a sharded citation record with a page per source, and full-text search. The content itself carried the deepening round: 28 briefs in Categories V and VIII rewritten from their research packs. Two defects reached production and were found by the deploy agent, not by the gates.
- Content. 28 briefs deepened from their research packs — every Category V energy brief and 14 Category VIII governance briefs — under the standing directive that depth of content, not word-count parity, is the objective. The packs held 136,311 words of flag-tagged research of which as little as 2% had reached some published briefs.
- Content. During the deepening, 8 rewrites were found to have dropped speculative- and handwave-flagged claims while adding evidence. All were restored: losing a flagged claim is a regression, because the uncertainty is the product.
- Architecture. Citation record sharded: one addressable page per source replaces the single citations-index monolith (6.45 MB, ~60,000 DOM nodes) that every reader downloaded in full and no brief could link into.
- Architecture. Site search added (static index, no server, no query logging), with a no-JavaScript path preserved for every piece of core content.
Found broken
- Search was dead on arrival: the build tool wrapped the search library's dynamic import in a preload helper and left its placeholder token unreplaced, so the search box accepted typing and never returned a result — while every search asset served a clean 200 and the release's asset gate passed. The gates measured delivery, not function.
- All 212 briefs threw a SyntaxError in the browser: TypeScript syntax in an inline script that is passed through verbatim, never transpiled. Every page rendered, so no gate noticed that none of them ran.
Five gates passed on a release whose two most visible interactive features did not work. Both defects share one shape: something derived (the packaged artifact) drifted from what it was derived from (a build that works in a browser), and nothing compared the two.