High-traffic absent retractions — Railspike debug log

2026-10-24T04:47:13+00:00 — Step 1

Necessary/useful instructions

• step1_solution_assessment.md, recommendation and vertical-slice requirement: distinguishes a safe normal-cache fix from merely silencing the guard or doing production canonical repair. Retain.

• RAILSPIKE.md, approval gates: establishes a reviewable safety boundary before altering publication behavior. Retain explicit gates, including for urgent production work unless the maintainer opts out.

• Experimental Effort Estimation, exposure disclosure: prior diagnosis and production evidence preceded this cycle; the artifact states this rather than inventing prospective independence. Retain.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

Step 4 branching/commit cadence is deferred until implementation approval. No dependencies, navigation destinations, UI-copy changes or read-model schema changes proposed at this step.

Uncertain assessments

Urgent incident work makes approval latency material, but urgency alone does not establish that the maintainer wants to waive their standing workflow. Follow the gate rather than infer an opt-out. Exact implementation size remains provisional until stale-content and race contracts are planned.

2026-10-24T05:06:56+00:00 — Step 2

Necessary/useful instructions

• step2_feature_description.md, Known user or environment: made DreamHost production verification distinct from local Apache acceptance and retained immediate disable/restore recovery. Retain.

• step2_feature_description.md, Shared component inventory: lists HTML, static/import, offline and removal consumers so changing one guard cannot silently relax all consumers. Retain.

• step2_feature_description.md, completion boundary and risks: explicitly defers unrelated offline fatal handling and blocks unsafe stale-content publication. Retain.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

Documentation-only boundaries do not apply to this application change. No new dependencies, navigation destinations, schema changes or UI-copy edits proposed.

Uncertain assessments

Exact stale generated-effect attribution and concurrent-source checks remain implementation-planning risks; the 0.65 total is reaffirmed provisionally without claiming runtime feasibility or production success.

2026-10-24T05:09:04+00:00 — Step 3

Necessary/useful instructions

• Step 3 Do, Completion Contract/Key Risks: caught the need to validate full HTML input beyond snapshot-only exclusions before wiring the cache. Retain.

• Step 3 After, known-environment recovery: final stage explicitly replays both missing-target IDs through Apache and keeps DreamHost host acceptance pending. Retain.

• Railspike planning-commit scope: prior standalone investigation remains outside this cycle's planning commit; ledger updates are retained as pending until stage documentation can include them. Retain clear file gate.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

Extended stage estimates not selected; ordinary R1/P2 checkpoint retained. No third-party additions, core schema changes, new navigation or UI-copy cleanup proposed.

Uncertain assessments

HTML projection is the material remaining engineering risk; Stage 2 must demonstrate exclusion/independent-content preservation before downstream wiring. Five approximately-hour stages are provisional; split if discoveries exceed atomic size. Prior diagnosis is included in the revised total; no measured labor claimed.

2026-10-24T05:23:19+00:00 — Step 4 handoff

Necessary/useful instructions

• step4_implementation_do.md, Stage Boundary Protocol: planning bf659506f followed by summary-bearing commits 89f593d99, e8caa8b8c, 75b8c876e, d4b41fe94, c53e866de preserves reviewable evidence/isolation/wiring/race/acceptance boundaries. Retain.

• step4_implementation_after.md, environment and verification limits: local Apache/browser acceptance and 108 focused checks are explicitly distinct from pending DreamHost deployment/cache-hit/cron checks. Retain.

• Shared-component/approval constraints: HTML uses an isolated admission/render context; strict consumers and snapshot reappearance semantics are not globally relaxed. No new dependencies or core schema changes. Retain.

• Planning-commit gate: isolated the feature index hunk from a concurrent unrelated README edit; substantive ledger changes entered stage documentation, not the planning-only commit. Retain.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

Extended estimates were not selected. New-navigation/icon, UI-copy audit and core-schema migration requirements do not apply; no corresponding application change was made. Physical-device and production execution were not authorized verification environments.

Uncertain assessments

Excluded builds derive a fresh view within worker limits; the local 1,794-post derivation took 3.187 seconds, but DreamHost may be slower. Warm hits bypass PHP and derivation, verified under Apache. Retain explicit enable/warm/rollback and cron verification in the operator handoff. Cycle retrospective 0.75 is a single exposed scope judgment, not measured labor or maintainer acceptance. Full suite and full-corpus publication are not claimed; bounded static/import coverage and focused runtime checks are identified in the summary.

Final stage c53e866de completes the five-stage approved local scope. Production and study comfortable-fit acceptance remain pending. This log-only handoff commit records the exact final-stage reference without amending stage history.

2026-10-24T06:16:55+00:00 — Step 4 revision: serving-path rebuild

Supersedes the earlier architectural assumption that a full excluded read-model rebuild inside every 30-second render was acceptable. Production timed out during indexing; last-stage output does not establish that subject indexing alone consumed the budget. The full rebuild belongs in explicit reusable preparation. Renderer and Application fallback now prohibit rebuilding. Validation still checks retraction/evidence and source-removal state; older safe content can be served after routine posts, matching shared-cache semantics. Both exact-input freshness and safety identities are stored as metadata values in the existing metadata table; no core schema or dependency change. See the implementation summary for checks, the initial browser failure/correction, operator commands and outstanding production performance acceptance.

2026-10-24T06:28:30+00:00 — Step 4 revision: six full-content scans per refresh

Production now prepares in 47.965 seconds and publishes / in 22.273 seconds; repeated refresh remains approximately 20 seconds. Code inspection finds six complete canonical fingerprints per refresh, left over from per-render model derivation. Rendering now uses a prepared snapshot, so it needs current retraction/absence and publication evidence, not full content rereads. Preparation retains its original exact content identity and format; deployed prepared files remain reusable. Actual CLI/worker instrumentation fails on any full-record fingerprint and passes after this correction. See summary for 54-test/Apache/browser evidence and separately observed public cache-hit recovery.