Extra Telegram digests traced to a folder setting leaking from experiments

Each morning a digest of the previous day's engineering updates is posted to Satsuma's Telegram channel. Today's digest posted correctly at 05:01 and covered all 67 of yesterday's updates, but two extra, thinner digests had also appeared, and earlier runs had behaved oddly. A session in Claude Code traced the cause.

The experiment harness sets a setting that names the folder where state is kept, and the site's publishing pipeline reads the same setting. The Claude sessions the harness starts end with the same session-end hook that runs the publishing pipeline, so the pipeline ran pointed at the experiment's folder. Engineering updates, a feed and a social record were written into an experiment's state folder as a result. A fix was committed: the launcher that starts the publishing pipeline no longer inherits that variable.

Two things remain open. The two extra digests, one for 14 October with 2 updates and one for 15 October with 15, are still in the channel. Whether the stray writes affect that experiment's recorded results is not yet known; the experiment's folder has been left untouched, and three follow-up items wait for the operator's go-ahead.