How this issue was assembled

Run summary

Date

2026-01-01

Digest model

claude-sonnet-4-6 · 26,687 in · 5,061 out

Sources

27/103 ok · 10 failed · 0 blocked · 66 empty

Items

49 fetched · 49 sent to LLM

Duration

182.6 s

User-Agent

evanalbright-digest/0.1

Retention funnel

The article path from collection to publication. Source tier is not a stage, quota, or automatic inclusion rule; it is a weak ranking and trust prior shown in the diagnostic tables below.

Fetch stats

Style rules

Hard punctuation and phrase rules applied to all generated prose.

# Style — hard rules for every paragraph

These rules apply to all generated prose (digest paragraphs and study why-lines). They are mechanically enforced; output that violates them will be repaired or rejected.

## Punctuation: forbidden

- **No em-dash (—).** Not anywhere. Use semicolons, commas, periods, or parentheses.
- **No en-dash (–) as punctuation.** Only acceptable when part of an established numeric range that you are quoting verbatim from a source.
- **No double-hyphen (`--`) used as a dash substitute.** Same intent as the em-dash; same ban.
- **No standalone hyphens used as punctuation.** Hyphens are only legal as part of a hyphenated compound word that already exists in the language (`co-founder`, `self-hosted`, `mid-cap`). They are never legal as a beat or pause in a sentence.

If you find yourself reaching for any of those, you have probably written a run-on. The fix is usually to split the sentence at a semicolon or period.

## Phrases to avoid (AI-slop list)

Do not use these unless you are quoting them verbatim from a source you are summarising. The list is maintained alongside this file in `prompts/slop-blocklist.txt` and is checked programmatically.

- "load-bearing" (overused metaphor)
- "delve" / "delves into" / "delving"
- "moreover" / "furthermore" (as paragraph openers)
- "in today's fast-paced..."
- "game-changing" / "game-changer"
- "navigating the landscape"
- "tapestry"
- "intricate" (as a default adjective)
- "underscores" (as in "this underscores the importance of")
- "key takeaway"
- "ushering in"
- "transformative"
- "robust" (as filler)
- "leverage" (as a verb, when "use" works)
- "synergy"
- "comprehensive" (as filler)
- "in the realm of"
- "a testament to"
- "stands as a beacon"
- "navigate the complexities"
- "harness the power of"
- "unlock the potential"
- "the rise of"
- "in an era where"
- "paradigm shift"

If a source actually contains one of those phrases, you may quote it but you must put it in quotes and attribute it.

## Voice

- **Write like a journalist reporting news, not a critic weighing articles.** Tell the reader what happened, what was claimed, what the numbers are. Do not describe the article itself.
- Past tense for events. Present tense for ongoing dynamics. Future tense only when actually speculating.
- One thought per sentence. If a sentence has three clauses, it is at least two sentences.
- No "exciting", "huge", "massive", "ground-breaking", "incredible". Skeptical neutral by default.
- Skip the editorial throat-clearing ("It is worth noting that..."; "What's interesting here is..."). State the thing.
- Numbers in numerals (`$2.1B`, `15 minutes`). Years written in full (`2026`, not `'26`).
- No exclamation points.

## Forbidden: meta-commentary about the article

These constructions describe the article instead of reporting its content. They are banned.

- "The piece is technical but the payoff is concrete..."
- "The volume is the story."
- "An eventful month by Lambert's own description..."
- "The piece uses X as the worked example..."
- "This is a careful statistical argument dressed as a cultural essay..."
- "Raschka's coverage is among the clearest explanations of..."
- "The piece does not claim X; it claims Y." (talking about what the article does)

Banned patterns:

- Any sentence whose subject is "the piece", "the post", "the article", "the essay", "the coverage", "the analysis", "the argument", "the take", "this piece", "this post".
- Any sentence that grades the article ("worth reading", "useful", "clearer than most", "among the best", "more useful than most takes").
- Any reference to the writing itself ("dressed as a cultural essay", "technical but concrete", "tight argument", "careful piece").

**Write what the author said or what happened, not how the author said it. The author is a source; you are reporting their claim, not reviewing their prose.**

Examples:

- Bad: "Lambert's companion piece argues that open ecosystems have a compounding property."
- Good: "Lambert argues that open ecosystems compound. Fine-tunes, evals, and tooling built on open weights accumulate publicly, so the marginal cost of the next improvement falls for everyone."

- Bad: "The piece uses China's high-participation release culture as the worked example."
- Good: "China's high-participation release culture is the example Lambert leans on. Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, and GLM-5.1 all shipped within weeks."

- Bad: "Raschka's coverage is among the clearest explanations of why per-token inference costs have been falling."
- Good: "Raschka traces falling per-token inference costs to three changes: KV cache sharing across layers, multi-head compression, and compressed attention over long contexts."

## Colons: use sparingly

You cannot use the em-dash, so do not now lean on the colon as a pause or pivot. A colon introduces a list, a definition, or a direct quote. It is not a dramatic beat or a "here comes the payoff" reveal.

- Bad: "The piece is technical but the payoff is concrete: these changes are what allow..."
- Bad: "The core issue is verification lag: in science, the feedback loop can take decades."
- Good: Use two sentences. "The core issue is verification lag. In science, the feedback loop can take decades."

If a sentence has more than one colon, rewrite it. If a colon sits between two complete independent clauses, it is almost always wrong; use a period.

## When in doubt

Read the sentence aloud. If you would never say it out loud to a friend, rewrite it. If a semicolon is the answer, use the semicolon. If a sentence would be better as two sentences, make it two sentences.