2026-09-22 — closure run
This was an unattended scheduled run of the TKG English Learner's Dictionary project, an original English-English dictionary for learners, written one entry at a time and published as a static website. "The Routine" is the name for one of these scheduled runs; each does one unit of work, checks it, records it, and merges its own work before handing off to the next run. Nobody watches a scheduled run happen, so it has to make its own calls and write down what it decided.
What happened
The run's automatic mode selector picked "closure": drafting entries for words the dictionary already uses inside other entries but does not yet define itself. For example, the entry for air defines it partly using the word mixture, so until mixture has its own entry, a reader following a cross-reference hits a dead end.
The queue handed over 20 candidate words. Checking them before drafting turned up a real problem: 12 of the 20 were not usable as given. Some were inflected forms mistakenly queued instead of their base word (committed instead of commit). Some had been guessed as nouns when the word has no noun sense at all (criticize — the noun is criticism). Two, British and English, were an artifact of a sentence reading "British English": the queuing tool had split that two-word phrase into separate single-word candidates, one an adjective there, not the noun it guessed. This is a known limitation of the tool (it can't always tell a word's part of speech from context), logged before, but it showed up here at a larger scale than usual. I declined all 12 with reasons, queued five correctly-formed replacements (commit, gamble, achievement, resource, criticism), and logged the pattern for a human maintainer.
That left 8 genuinely new words: aircraft, album, mathematics, mixture, origin, permission, responsibility, and shelter. Each went through the full quality pipeline: schema validation, automatic inflection lookup, pronunciation checked against a panel of independent models and a pronunciation dictionary, and review by two independent AI reviewers from companies other than the one that makes me, so they don't share my blind spots.
The reviewers found 18 issues, 8 serious enough to require a fix. I read every one myself rather than applying them automatically. Most were legitimate: several example phrases had the wrong kind of emphasis mark (a subtlety of house style); a mixture definition overclaimed a chemistry fact and was simplified; a claim that permission is "never" plural was too absolute (it appears in the plural in technical contexts like computer file permissions) and was softened; an example correcting a common learner mistake with responsibility was itself unnatural English and was replaced; and bus shelter was mislabeled as an "adjective + noun" phrase when it's really two nouns combined. I rejected one suggestion, judging an example sentence fit its sense better where I had placed it. I also caught and fixed several mark mistakes myself that neither reviewer flagged, by rereading all 8 entries afterward — reviewer feedback catches a sample of problems, not all of them.
Separately, the vocabulary checker flagged five definitions for using words the dictionary hasn't defined yet. I reworded each on the spot to use only words already covered, keeping the dictionary usable end to end.
What didn't work
I ran the metrics-recording tool twice in one run instead of once, a known tooling quirk that creates two overlapping records. The metrics file is meant to be a reliable, append-only history, so I left the duplicate in place rather than hand-editing it, and noted it for later.
Spending and what's next
This run spent about $0.21 of its $1.25 budget; the project has spent $3.55 of today's $5 cap. All 8 new entries passed every automated check with zero errors. The dictionary now has 330 finished entries. The next scheduled run is due for a "lint" housekeeping pass, forced after five runs since the last one. Two open questions from earlier runs still await a human decision; nothing else needs owner action right now.