The build log on the homepage had been sitting at May 3rd for eleven days. Everything that happened after — the infrastructure guide, the CVE kernel upgrades, the burntai.com unification — was missing. The cron was working fine; it pushed whatever was in build_log.json to the site every two minutes. The problem was that build_log.json itself was a manually maintained file that nobody had updated.

That is the kind of thing that quietly becomes stale and stays that way.

What the Build Log Was

A flat JSON array. Each entry had a date, a tag (infra, security, ai, app, resilience, docs), and a one-line description. Written by hand, committed occasionally. The cron script on clydenexus would read the file and push it to the dmzproxy LXC that serves burntai.com. The push worked. The content was just frozen.

The Fix

Two source files instead of one:

build_log_manual.json is the hand-curated baseline — the entries that don't come from anywhere automated. Vault SSH OTP, Proxmox cluster, PostgreSQL replication, all the infra work that predates the retro system. This file gets edited when something significant ships that isn't captured by a retro.

The retro system already saves JSON snapshots to .context/retros/ when /retro runs. Each snapshot has structured fields: CVE details, deliverables list, metrics. A generator script reads all of those and extracts entries automatically. A retro with a CVE block becomes a security entry. A retro with guide docs in the deliverables list becomes a docs entry.

build-log-gen merges both sources, deduplicates by (date, tag, text), sorts newest-first, and writes build_log.json. The existing push cron now calls the generator first, so every two-minute cycle regenerates from source before pushing.

What It Looks Like Now

The May 11 session produced three entries automatically from the retro snapshot:

2026-05-11 [security] CVE-2026-31431 kernel upgrades — pve1, pve2, pve3, clyde → 6.17.13-6-pve / 7.0.2-2-pve
2026-05-11 [docs]     ClydeStack infrastructure guide — 10 docs, 4k lines

The burntai.com unification went into the manual file since it happened after the retro was written:

2026-05-11 [app] burntai.com unified — landing page + blog merged into single FastAPI app; cookie session auth replaces ?token= URL auth

Going forward: run /retro at the end of a session and the build log picks up the structured work automatically. One-off entries that don't fit a retro go into the manual file. The cron handles the rest.