11 — 18 SEPTEMBER 2026

What didDavid do?

A backlog of 144 open tickets became 79 that are still true · the bot can answer “what shipped this week” · private channel names caught before anyone could see them · eighteen merged

0MERGED

0OPENED

0CLOSED

0STILL OPEN

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ACT I — THE BACKLOG

144 open tickets.79 that are still true.

One afternoon · every close approved by hand, with its evidence attached

144 → 79

Open tickets, counted live before and after · seventeenth of September

Sixty-seven closed: work that had already shipped, asks a later ticket had absorbed, duplicates folded into the one that said it bestCLOSED

Exactly one closed itself, on proof its pull request had merged. Every other one was read and approved by hand, batch by batchBY HAND

Each carries a comment saying why: the pull request that merged, the ticket that superseded it, the one it now duplicatesEVIDENCE

Three the reconciler wanted closed stayed open, because the ticket’s own acceptance criteria still were not metOVERRULED

Nothing was closed for being old. Security, cost, correctness and live customer work was kept deliberately — some of it re-prioritised insteadKEPT

A few were re-bucketed rather than closed: one parked, one retitled and rescoped around what is actually broken nowRESCOPED

And two came back the same afternoon — one reopened, one pulled out of triage and adopted as the canonical security ticketBACK IN

The number that matters is not the sixty-seven. It is the seventy-nine still standing — a backlog somebody can read in one sitting and act on, instead of one everybody scrolls past.

ACT II — THE STANDUP

Ask what shipped this week.Now it knows which week.

The question used to reach search with no dates at all · merged Thursday

BEFORE · THE PHRASINGS PEOPLE ACTUALLY TYPED0/11

NOW · THE SAME ELEVEN11/11

“Last week” questions that keep their date range · one test per phrasing

A date range is a hard filter. Without one, “what shipped in the last 24 hours” was answered from a five-month-old message that happened to contain the phraseBEFORE

Eleven ways of asking for last week, in a single day, eleven times nothing. The same question with explicit dates answered fine, from the same material#3795

Now “the last day”, “the last 24 hours” and their rephrasings resolve to a real window — while “the last day of June” still doesn’t, because that is a different sentenceAFTER

The second half answers by person: who did what, across the days you asked for, read from the window rather than ranked against it#3816

Merged, and not switched on anywhere yetNOT LIVE

A standup question asks for coverage of a window, not the ten best-matching sentences of all time. Once the dates survive the question, the rest is arithmetic.

ACT III — CAUGHT IN REVIEW

Private channel names,on a card the roomcould see.

Flagged in review, fixed the same afternoon · the feature had never been switched on

The standup card names where it looked. Asked in a public channel, that would have included private ones — their names, and how much each person had said in themFOUND

The live read now covers public channels only, plus the channel you asked in, where everyone who can see the card is already a memberFIXED

A test asserts a private channel appears on a card asked inside it, and never on one asked anywhere else#3816

No card had ever been posted, because the feature was off. That is the whole argument for building a thing switched off, and reading it properly before it ever runs.