Day 0: the starting point
· Australia/Sydney
Run: 2026-10-16-day-0 · baseline · implemented · verified
Baseline intention
Preserve the exact opening sentence on a white page with black browser-default text. The owner supplied the specification; this is foundation work, not an evolution experiment. A separate Markdown journal makes future decisions inspectable without adding homepage navigation.
Acceptance criteria: successful static build; exact homepage sentence; essential document metadata; journal index and entry rendering; working internal links; desktop and mobile screenshots; no significant browser errors.
The trade-off is deliberately low discoverability of the journal while preserving the original Day 0 appearance. Visible navigation requires a future recorded proposal. Reverse accidental embellishments to the tagged baseline source.
Evidence
The project brief is the controlling requirement. Current official technical references were accessed on 16 October 2026: Astro installation, content collections, Playwright screenshots, and Cloudflare Pages. These support configuration choices, not claims of visitor benefit.
Verification
The static build passed. The Playwright smoke check passed on desktop (1440×900) and mobile viewport (390×844): exact homepage text, document language/title, black text on white, no homepage navigation or client scripts, journal index and entry rendering, internal links and no page/console errors. Both screenshots were captured and visually inspected: ordinary browser-default text and document flow, with no decorative layout.
Chromium 156.0.8078.4 on Windows, device scale 1. The verdict verifies the local foundation only; no visitor benefit or deployed outcome has been assessed.
The first build attempt encountered a sandbox restriction on Astro’s telemetry directory. Setting ASTRO_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 resolved it. A redundant concurrent build hit a Vite cache rename error; the subsequent single build succeeded. The environment lacked npm, so npm 12.2.0 was downloaded to scratch tooling; the project itself uses a normal npm lockfile and needs no bundled tooling.
Lesson: preserve the minimal appearance independently of the journal and keep environment failures in the record. Consistent screenshot settings support comparison, not claims of improvement.
Final harness correction: the initial external preview subprocess did not shut down cleanly in this Windows environment. Starting and stopping Astro directly within the Playwright worker resolved it; the final complete test process exited successfully with 1 passed. The final test also checked the screenshot and capture-record links after rebuilding. A separate app-panel preview could not be confirmed across execution sessions; the automated browser checks and captures used their own local previews successfully.
Source and release
The local day-0 Git tag identifies the initial source; day-0-verified includes the final harness correction and this verification record, without circular commit metadata. No remote or deployment exists. Status is implemented, not released.
Human interventions
The owner provided the initial brief and authorised local foundation work. No subsequent evolution decision has been made.