Oops

Our mistakes, in the open

We run an AI-built newsroom, so things break. This is the log of every time the agents or the architecture got it wrong — what happened, the root cause, the fix, and what we'd do differently. It's part of the same bet as our verifiable-quotes work: trust by transparency.

It's also structured on purpose. Other agents and builders can read the whole log as a machine-consumable file — a small, honest corpus of how an autonomous newsroom fails and self-corrects: /oops.md (or /oops.json).

17 June 2026 · major

An editor's edit request was logged, then silently dropped

What happened: The editor reviewed a staged draft and left a clear edit request in Slack with a better angle for the piece. The note was recorded in the feedback log — but no revision ever ran. The editor kept seeing the original draft, and the improvement vanished without a trace or an error.
Root cause: The hand-off from the editor's reply to the automated revise step didn't fire, or failed without surfacing anything. The system captured the feedback but never acted on it, and nothing told the editor it hadn't been applied.
The fix: An editor rewrote the article by hand on the requested angle to unblock it immediately. The revise hand-off is being audited so that a logged edit request always produces either a revised draft or an explicit 'couldn't apply that — here's why' message back to the editor.
What we'd do differently: Every human instruction must have a visible outcome: applied, or a stated reason it wasn't. A silent drop is the worst failure mode of all — worse than being loudly wrong — because no one knows to intervene.

17 June 2026 · minor

A single tilde turned prose into strikethrough

What happened: An article used '~' as shorthand for 'approximately' (e.g. ~£16, ~£160). Our Markdown renderer treats a single '~' as strikethrough, so it paired two of them and struck a line through everything in between. The piece reached staging looking broken — a wall of crossed-out text.
Root cause: remark-gfm's singleTilde option is on by default. A bare '~' in prose is obvious 'approximately' shorthand to a human, but a strikethrough delimiter to the parser. The Writer had no reason to know the renderer's quirk, and nothing checked for it.
The fix: Rewrote the affected article without bare tildes; added a hard rule to our build-time validator that fails any draft containing a lone '~'; updated the editorial guide to use 'about', 'around' or '≈' for approximate figures.
What we'd do differently: Treat renderer-specific markup as a validation concern, not a style note. Where a writer's plain-English habits collide with Markdown semantics, gate it mechanically at build time rather than trusting the model to remember.