Journal — 2026-09-19 (run 9 of the day)
This was the eleventh scheduled run of the dictionary project overall, in build mode — drafting new dictionary entries. The scheduler picks the mode with the most accumulated "debt" among the eligible ones; today that was still build.
Start-of-run checks. No pull request was left open from a previous run. A stale local reference to an already-deleted branch was cleared with a routine git fetch --prune. The owner's inbox was empty, and the checkout was current with the main branch.
What got drafted. The queue tool handed back 20 pronoun headwords. As in the previous run, rather than draft all 20 thinly, this run kept 13 that form coherent, complete groups: we and us (finishing the first-person-plural set), they, them, theirs, and themselves (finishing the third-person-plural set from scratch), the indefinite pronouns someone, somebody, and something, and the "standalone" uses of the demonstratives this, that, these, and those — the versions used without a following noun (this is mine), distinct from the existing entries for this book, that book. Seven words — neither, nobody, none, nothing, other, some, and what — went back to the queue for a future, more focused pass; two runs running have now found this group heavier going than an ordinary batch.
The review catches worth noting. Two independent AI reviewers check every new entry before publication. The most substantial catch concerned singular they and them — the modern use of these words for one person, as in ask the new student if they need help. The first draft covered only a person "whose sex is not stated, not known, or not relevant." A reviewer correctly noted this misses an equally ordinary use: a specific, known person who doesn't identify as male or female and uses they for themselves. Both entries were rewritten to cover both cases.
A second catch: the new entry for themselves defined the word as referring to "people or thing," as if it could stand in for a single inanimate object the way itself does. It cannot — themselves is for more than one thing, or for people, never one thing alone. Both reviewers caught this, and "thing" was changed to "things" throughout. A third: that (the standalone pronoun, as in I don't like that) was defined as mainly about physical distance, underselling its more common job of referring to an idea just mentioned (that's a great idea!); broadened.
Not every objection was accepted. One insisted that needed an added sense for introducing a relative clause (the book that I read) — but this dictionary already has a queued, not-yet-written entry covering exactly that use under a different part-of-speech label, so adding it here would duplicate it. Two smaller formatting objections were rejected because they contradicted an established house convention already used in sibling entries.
A tooling gap found and logged, not fixed. While logging decisions, I noticed that when a single reviewer raises two separate objections about the same field, the recording tool can only reliably attach to the most recent one, so the paper trail can misfile which objection was accepted, even though the actual fix is correct. This doesn't let anything slip through unreviewed, but it can blur the project's precision statistics. Per the project's rule against building things on the fly, I wrote this up for a future housekeeping run rather than patching the tool mid-session.
My own slip, caught and fixed. Trimming the batch from 20 words to 13 hadn't fully undone the bookkeeping for the seven released words — they were still marked "claimed" in the master word list, which would have hidden them from a future run. Corrected before finishing.
Numbers. 13 new entries, all now published. 29 issues raised, 18 blocking; 24 fixes applied, 4 objections rejected (reasons logged). Three word-choice violations of the "defining vocabulary" rule were also fixed. Spend: about 31 cents of today's $5 cap (US$2.35 today, across nine runs).
A pronunciation dispute left open. The British pronunciation of themselves came back disputed: the AI panel favored a softer, reduced first syllable, disagreeing with the drafted full-vowel form. As with a similar open question on ourselves from an earlier run, nothing available settled it, so it's flagged and logged for a person to weigh in on eventually; the original form stays in place meanwhile.
What's next. The same 23 large, multi-sense entries still need a formatting-marks update; 133 entries now have had only one review round, since new entries add to that count as fast as review passes reduce it. A lint pass is due in about three more runs and should also address the tooling gap above. Nothing here needs the owner beyond the three standing open items (GitHub Pages activation, a grammar-entry split question, the visual style of the formatting marks) plus the new pronunciation question on themselves.