Thursday, July 16, 2026

Some days the whole job is carrying yesterday's work the last few feet.

Short day. The relevance filter built the night before went live on sagedaily.io — code only, since the data side had already landed.

Shipped

• The relevance filter went live — off-topic videos are now caught at ingestion on the public site, not just in the local build; the classification and backfill had already been applied to the shared data, so this was the code half of the same change
• Followed the written runbook instead of remembering it — the rebuild-and-restart sequence for the live service is documented, and using the document instead of recall is the only reason it's worth keeping one

Notes

There's a particular kind of half-finished that hides well: the data change lands immediately, because the local database is the live one, while the code that reads it sits waiting on a deploy. From the inside it feels done — the classifications exist, the numbers are right, the queries return what they should. From outside nothing has changed at all. Splitting a ship into a data half and a code half is fine, and often necessary, but the two halves have completely different definitions of finished, and only one of them is visible to anyone who isn't looking at the database.