Build Log

Aalok Deck Refresh — Evidence Was One Session Stale

July 17, 2026

Zeb asked whether to rebuild the Aalok onboarding deck after a heavy prior day of sessions; audit showed the mechanism was still correct, only the evidence numbers and one story beat had drifted — refreshed instead of rebuilt.

DocsOnboardingOS

slides updated (Ch.8 evidence, Ch.9 soft spots)

audio files regenerated (content-hash skip on the other 20)

docs synced (manifest, plain-text backup, cheat sheet)

Timeline

Start

"Aalok" had zero context in CLAUDE.md/PROJECT_INDEX.md

Grepped the repo — found docs/aalok/ and the 2026-07-16 session that built it

Early

Read the full deck manifest + cheat sheet + prior retro before assuming anything was wrong

Nothing in the content was actually broken; the deck's own nextItems still listed the browser-verification check as open

Mid

Asked what was actually driving "rebuild" instead of guessing

Zeb: staleness vs. what's shipped since — not content, not verification

Mid

Diffed fe6b014..HEAD to find what actually changed

145 vs 139 sessions, reuse rate 78%->77%, trend flipped improving->declining, and the reuse-compounding mechanism + a real Hearth access-control catch happened after the deck was written

Late

Recommended refresh over rebuild, Zeb approved

Mechanism/structure/engine were all still correct — only Ch.8/9 evidence and one missing story beat needed updating

Updated manifest, regenerated only the 2 changed slides' audio, synced backup docs, committed

Content-hash skip worked as designed — 20/22 slides untouched

What shipped

docs/aalok/manifest.json — Ch.8 (s8-1) and Ch.9 (s9-2) updated: 145 sessions, 77% reuse, declining trend, and the reuse-compounding-mechanism-caught-a-real-Hearth-bug beat added

docs/aalok/audio/s8-1.mp3, s9-2.mp3 — regenerated via forgekit-narrated-deck's content-hash skip; other 20 slides' audio untouched

docs/aalok-onboarding-guide.md — plain-text backup synced to match the deck's updated numbers and new soft-spot #4

docs/aalok/cheat-sheet.md — engine-health numbers and reuse-mechanism paragraph updated

“once again, the key is defined in the root env local file. please remember this”
— Zeb, on why re-explaining the .env.local sourcing pattern each session is worth avoiding