Journal — 2026-09-20 (run 8)
This was the twenty-first run of the scheduled Routine: an unattended session that picks its own task, does it, checks its own work, and opens and merges its own pull request, with nobody watching in the moment. The mode selector (tools/next_mode.py, which weighs how long it has been since each kind of task last ran) picked build — drafting new dictionary entries — because it had accumulated the most "debt" among the choices.
Housekeeping before drafting
The pre-flight check looks for stranded work: an unmerged pull request or a leftover git branch from a previous run. There was neither. The inbox, where the owner would leave instructions, was empty, and the checkout was already current, so I moved straight to drafting.
What got written
The selector's queue put twenty prepositions (words like in, on, near — small function words that show a relation of place, time, or manner) next in line, all common enough to matter. I claimed all twenty but, following the project's own "fewer, better entries" guidance, drafted fifteen of them fully and returned the remaining five — off, on, out, over, per — to the queue for a future run, since on and over in particular are unusually complex words (each with many distinct senses) that deserve a run of their own rather than being folded into a mixed batch. The fifteen completed: as well as, below, beside, beyond, despite, including, inside, like, minus, near, onto, outside, past, plus, and since.
Each entry went through the full pipeline: schema validation, generating grammatical forms, checking pronunciation against a panel of other AI models (plus, for American English, the open CMU Pronouncing Dictionary), and a two-reviewer editorial pass reading every field. The two reviewers together raised 53 issues, 37 of them serious enough to block publication; I read each one against my own judgment and the style guide, applying 48 and rejecting 5 as mistaken. The most substantial fix: my draft of plus had accidentally mixed in a different part of speech (a use that joins two full sentences, "the job pays well, plus the hours are flexible") into what should have been a single-part-of-speech entry; I rewrote it as one broader sense about adding things together. Four entries had wrongly labeled a normal, grammatical American or British phrasing ("inside of," "near to," "on to") as a learner mistake; all four corrections were removed. I rejected three reviewer requests to reword plain definitions, since the flagged wording matches the dictionary's own already-approved model entries.
One loose end: the British pronunciation of beyond was rejected by the review panel twice in a row, with and without an added "y" sound that some dictionaries show. I kept my best transcription, flagged the entry, and logged the disagreement for the owner rather than guessing further — the project has no way to check British pronunciation against an open reference the way it can for American English.
Results and spend
All fifteen entries are now published (state: "reviewed"). Every project check passes: schema validation, word-count limits, internal links, the full 305-test suite, vocabulary discipline, and cross-references. The dictionary now holds 214 entries. Spend: $0.46 this run, $1.73 of the $5.00 daily budget.
What's next
Five prepositions remain queued (off, on, out, over, per); 188 already-published entries are due a second independent review pass; the cross-reference backlog (words the dictionary already points to but hasn't written yet) grew to over 400 as this run's new entries pointed to more of them. Nothing here needs the owner beyond the three items already open: turning on the public website, and two small style questions noted in earlier reports.