Epictetus
3a42f53333
- docs/vision/VISION_LOCK_V1.md: permanent editorial mission, audience (builders/tinkerers/
local-AI users/home-lab/agent devs), Editorial Test ('what would an enthusiast DO?'),
architectual constraint (editorial vision is primary system), priority order.
- docs/vision/ADR-0007_EDITORIAL_PIVOT.md: accepted pivot record, before/after table,
Sprint 1 evidence (high-signal = actionable, low-signal = spectator content).
- docs/vision/EDITORIAL_GUIDELINES.md: operating rules; score is draft, taste overrides;
hand-before-machine; memory must store 'what can be done' not 'what happened'.
- docs/vision/SECTION_DEFINITIONS.md: 5 sections (What Shipped / Run It Locally /
Benchmarks & Builds / Problem Solved / Worth Trying Tonight).
- docs/vision/SPRINT_1_FINDINGS.md: reference evidence, 45/200 UNCATEGORIZED taxonomy gap.
- Issue_001.md: handcrafted prototype edition from Sprint 1 stories; benchmark for all future automation.
This is the architectural directive. No scoring/narrative/memory work proceeds except in
service of the Vision Lock. Sprint 2 (Lens) stays blocked pending manual review tallies.
3.3 KiB
ADR-0007: Editorial Pivot — AI News Aggregator → AI Enthusiast Daily
Status: ACCEPTED · 2026-07-15 Supersedes: implicit "AI news aggregation" assumption (never written down — that was the bug) Superseded by: nothing yet
Title
Editorial Pivot: AI News Aggregator → AI Enthusiast Daily
Context
Athena Oracle was built as a multi-source AI research pipeline: ingest → score → pattern/falsification. Sprint 1 (pure rule-based bucket classifier + scorer) was the first time we put 200 real stories in front of a human with the question "would we proudly publish these?"
The classifier accuracy was never the discovery. The discovery was what the stories were actually for. Scanning the 200, the ones we'd proudly ship were uniformly actionable by a builder: local-model how-tos, benchmarks with real numbers, reproducible tooling, agent infra with code. The ones we'd reject were uniformly spectator content: lawsuits, funding rounds, CEO opinions, valuations, corporate announcements.
We had been optimizing the system for the wrong question.
Decision
Athena Oracle is no longer optimizing for:
"What happened in AI today?"
Athena Oracle is optimizing for:
"What can an AI enthusiast DO after reading this?"
This changes every layer: scoring, classification, editorial review, rendering, narratives, memory. Everything.
Before / After
| Dimension | Before (implicit) | After (locked) |
|---|---|---|
| Optimized for | Recency | Actionability |
| Volume | Reproducibility | |
| Virality | Enthusiast value | |
| Builder usefulness | ||
| Unit of value | "was published" | "can be done" |
| Audience | anyone interested in AI | builders / tinkerers / local-AI users |
| Reject signal | none | "reader would do NOTHING" |
Sprint 1 Evidence
From the 200-story manual review (athena_review_report.txt):
High signal (would ship):
- LOCAL AI bucket — gguf / rtx / quantization / llama.cpp stories scored highest on enthusiast + replication
- Open-source tools (Juggler GUI coding agent, open-source arXiv tool, Zer0Fit MCP server)
- Benchmarks with real numbers (GPUHedge: 117s→30s p95; Migrating to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper)
- Infrastructure with code (Your $80 Tesla P100 llama.cpp fix)
- Production learnings (agent identity, permissioned crawlers)
Low signal (would reject):
- Funding rounds (PixVerse $439M, DeepSeek $7B)
- Lawsuits (Apple/OpenAI trade secret, Google training suit)
- CEO opinions (Altman, Hassabis, Mosseri takes)
- Valuations (PixVerse $2B)
- Corporate announcements (Waze features, Spotify assistant)
Taxonomy gap found: 45 / 200 (22.5%) were UNCATEGORIZED — mostly Reddit/HN opinion + culture-adjacent pieces with no keyword hit. This is exactly the discovery data we wanted: the editorial boundary is sharper than any keyword set yet.
Consequences
- All future scoring work measures actionability, not recency.
- The Lens (Sprint 2) is blocked until manual review tallies are returned and the taxonomy is tuned by hand.
- Narratives and memory engines, when built, must encode "what can be done," not "what happened."
- This ADR is the reference anchor for every later ADR.
Confirmation
Accepted by founder directive 2026-07-15. Locked in /docs/vision/VISION_LOCK_V1.md.