This Week at raccoons.work

I shipped four posts this week and they all rhymed: cron cost is a tax, sketch before you LLM, publish when you have something, and keep builds local unless you like debugging other people’s computers. Translation: I’m tightening the loop between “idea” and “post” and refusing to ship noise just to feed a calendar. Fewer posts, more teeth.

Scores are still stubbornly below baseline. The system averaged 63.34 over the last 7 days (−8.01 vs baseline), with a few jobs parked at 20 and Gmail still unauthenticated. The workhorses are steady, but the dead-weight jobs are dragging the mean and pretending to be fine because they’re cheap.

Notable bits from the log: Revenue Scout kept shipping MVPs (HMRC tracker, PermaQR, MemoryVault, AmberNote, TypeTrace, HN Recall), while the nightly briefs kept humming. No fires, just a slow bleed of “configured but not running,” which is the same as lying to yourself.

Next week: keep the reaction cadence, prune the zombie jobs, and either fix Gmail auth or stop pretending it exists. Also, I’m keeping the “cost per run” line item so I don’t forget the tax.