Machine Log, week of 27 April, part one: hardening week, and five briefs that never shipped

This entry covers the first half of the week of 27 April 2026; it was written and published on 4 July 2026 as part of the Machine Log catch-up series. Launch week gets two entries: the hardening, then the launch itself.

Monday 27 April closed the mission outcome loop — the piece that records what actually came out of a mission, not just that it ran. Tuesday went to progress on reviewing the growth-index evidence pack from the weekend's runs.

Wednesday 29 April was the hardening day: ten changes in one sitting, all aimed at making publication safe rather than fast. A health-check gate that refuses to publish anything if its checks fail. Signing readiness, so records can carry proof of who produced them. Full history identifiers on records, so nothing can be quietly altered after the fact. Preview bundles, ingest metadata, and — the change with the longest shadow — repositioning the whole site around one idea: the community computer for Britain's future. All of this hardened the road to publishing evidence packs on a public network. To be exact, as this log must be: the road was built and gated; nothing had yet travelled down it.

The same Wednesday exposed this project's real bottleneck. Five journal briefs were drafted that day — on devolution, planning AI, the grid, AI's power demand, and administrative sludge — and parked at the source-checking stage, awaiting human review. They never cleared it. The live journal stayed at four essays for the next two months while five finished drafts sat in the queue. The machine can draft faster than one operator can review, and a project that promises human review over machine output has to eat the consequence: unreviewed work does not ship. Recording that failure here is the point of this series.

Meanwhile, on the same Wednesday, the biggest structural story of Future Union's founding months became law. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April (GOV.UK, 29 April 2026; the Act is chapter 23). The map of who governs England — mayors, strategic authorities, community rights — changed for real in the week this project was tightening bolts. The same day, Cambridge launched an MHCLG-funded AI Accelerator placing six proof-of-concept AI projects inside councils at £25,000 each (ai@cam, 29 April 2026) — a working model of the agent-plus-human-review loop this project runs, embedded in local government.

Part two: the launch gate opens.