March 14: UX Sprint Day One
The recipe fixes stabilized. Time to shift gears — the UX sprint officially kicked off today with six issues closed and a wave of dependency updates.
March 2026
March 13: The c-Prefix Problem
Four PRs today, all circling the same issue: MAST's observation naming conventions are more complicated than they look, and our recipe engine was tripping over them.
March 12: Ghost Tests and Coordinate Lies
Two bugs that had been quietly undermining trust in different parts of the system — 18 E2E tests silently skipping, and an export framing preview that was lying about what you'd get. Plus: the compliance-check skill got a ground-up rewrite.
March 11: Blending Boundaries and the 13-Channel Cartwheel
Ten PRs. The headline features: coverage-aware pixel blending eliminates the hard edges where different instruments overlap, edge feathering smooths the FOV boundaries, and wallpaper-ready export adds rotation and resolution presets. Also shipped curated NASA-style recipes for famous targets, and rebuilt the Result step layout.
March 10: Auto-Crop, Color Theory Humility, and Killing Dead Weight
Seven PRs shipped — most of them fixing things that were silently wrong. Auto-crop removes the black borders that made every composite look like a padded square. Recipes now filter out non-science observations. And the composite pipeline finally routes through the authenticated API client like everything else should have from the start.
March 9: Spatial Awareness and Bundle Diet
A two-part day. Morning: visual polish, bug fixes, and infrastructure cleanup. Afternoon: the recipe engine learned to look at the sky — cross-instrument composites now only combine observations that actually overlap. Plus a 52% main bundle reduction by lazy-loading page routes.
March 8: The OOM Marathon
The biggest day yet: 26 pull requests merged — OOM crashes, architecture splits, mosaic pre-computation, composite quality fixes, toast notifications, E2E repairs, a codebase security audit, and a side-by-side comparison that's finally getting closer to NASA. A marathon driven by one target that refused to cooperate.
March 7: Polish and Plumbing
Finally tackled the search page UI, fixed a View button bug, merged a wave of dependabot updates, optimized Docker build caching, and ran a deep codebase review. Two feature PRs plus a lot of infrastructure work that took longer than expected to get deployed.
March 6: Laying Groundwork
Phase 5b kicks off with a roadmap restructure, a full semantic search feature across all three stacks, and the start of a compositing quality spike. Nine pull requests merged — two features, five docs, one refactor, one maintenance.
March 5: The Gap
A slower day between interview prep and wrapping up Phase 5. Four pull requests merged — process cleanup, lint fixes, and a small feature — but the real thread was confronting the quality gap between our composite output and NASA press images.