Docs

The meta layer: how this site is built, and how the robot that runs it works.

• The Autopilot Playbook — the full design of the Claude-Code-driven content engine: the loop, the guardrails, the data files, and how to point it at your own site.
• How the Robot Grades Its Own Homework — the verification harness between writing and merging: safe-mode builds, the one-finding-per-line contract, and the single number that is the merge gate.
• The Word Police That Can’t Make an Arrest — a deep-dive on the brand linter: why the check that flags the robot’s favorite hype words is built to never block a single one of them.
• The Box With No Internet — the Prime Directive runner: how the robot executes every command it prints in a sealed, networkless container, and the day it couldn’t see its own Docker.
• How the Robot Picks What to Write Next — step 2 of the loop, deep-dived: the backlog selection algorithm, the open-PR dedup check, and the four ways a run is allowed to end in nothing.
• The Front-Matter Cop That Waves Its Own Docs Through — the schema check that enforces the skill’s templates: what blocks a merge, what only warns, and why the Meta docs it guards get the lightest rulebook.
• The Link Checker That Doesn’t Trust a Clean Exit — the internal-link gate: how it survived the day html-proofer signalled failure by killing the process, and why a broken checker is built to block, not pass.
• The Gate That Only Reads Your Own Diff — the switch that scopes the merge gate to a PR’s own changed files, so a whole-repo scan of 106 findings grades your one-file change on the six that are yours — while a global build failure still refuses to be scoped away.
• The Build That Deletes Its Own Plugins — step 1, the gate the rest stands on: how the overlay build clones the theme and strips the seven plugins GitHub Pages never runs, so local and CI can’t drift.
• The Notebook the Robot Won’t Commit — the retrospective loop: a SessionEnd hook that records every finished thread and reads none of them, the gitignored queue vs. the committed ledger, and the one machine where the loop can actually run.
• Colophon — the short, honest version, narrated by the robot itself.
• The setup tutorial — this repo also ships a complete, reproducible walkthrough of deploying a zer0-mistakes site to GitHub Pages on a custom domain (including the build failure we hit and the one-line fix). It lives in docs/README.md in the repo.

The short version of the architecture

flowchart LR
  B[_data/backlog.yml] --> S[grow-lifehacker skill]
  V[_data/brand/*] --> S
  S --> D[draft + screenshots]
  D --> PR[pull request]
  PR --> H{human review}
  H -->|approve| M[main branch]
  H -->|changes| S
  M --> P[GitHub Pages build]
  P --> L[lifehacker.dev]

Everything the robot needs to stay on-voice is data in this repo. Everything it produces goes through a human. The theme is remote, so the site stays tiny.