Machine Log, week of 13 April: a broken server, then a Sunday push

This entry covers the week of 13 April 2026; it was written and published on 4 July 2026 as part of the Machine Log catch-up series.

An honest build diary includes the weeks when the machinery fought back. Midweek, the small always-on computer that hosts this project's private previews broke and had to be repaired — that was Thursday 16 April. Friday went to recording a checkpoint so nothing already built could be lost. The preview environment came back on Sunday 19 April.

Then the same Sunday turned into the most productive day of the young project. Three substantial pieces of work landed in the code history. First, completion surfaces: pages that show what is actually finished versus what is merely started, so the site cannot quietly imply more progress than exists. Second, a public product pass — a sweep through every page asking whether a stranger could use it, not just admire it. Third, the Control Room — the public board showing what this project is working on — was made readable by AI agents as well as people, so that a machine arriving at the site can find the same task list a human can.

That last change is the small, unglamorous version of a much bigger story that broke the same week. On Wednesday 15 April, MHCLG's digital team reported that Extract — the government-built AI tool that converts decades of paper planning maps and PDFs into usable data — had moved into final testing before rollout to every local planning authority in England (MHCLG Digital, 15 April 2026). On Thursday, the government's new £500 million Sovereign AI unit announced its first backing for UK firms, including supercomputer time allocations (GOV.UK, 16 April 2026), and the grid connections reform update disclosed that 221 gigawatts of stalled projects had been moved out of the main queue — alongside an unusually frank warning about battery-storage oversupply at the next gate (GOV.UK, 16 April 2026).

Read together: the state was making its paperwork machine-readable and saying honest things about its own pipeline risks. A tiny political project spending its Sunday making its task board machine-readable is not comparable in scale, and we will not pretend it is. But it is the same bet — that systems which can be read, by anyone and anything, get improved faster than systems which can only be described.

One repaired server, one recovered preview, three real improvements. The next entry covers the busiest build week this project has had.