How this issue was assembled

Run summary

Date

2026-05-15

Digest model

claude-sonnet-4-6 · 16,351 in · 3,040 out

Roundup model

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · 17,013 in · 1,813 out

Sources

50/68 ok · 1 failed · 0 blocked · 17 empty

Items

252 fetched · 150 sent to LLM

Duration

98.7 s

User-Agent

evanalbright-digest/0.1

Retention funnel

Where each stage's items came from. Single axis, four stops; each bar is split by source tier so you can see whether the mix shifts as we cut down to what readers actually see.

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.