The engine drafts. I decide what ships.
Over the first half of 2026 I built and ran the workflow for production pipelines in Claude Code. Skills, slash commands and subagents carry one job each, with named checks between the draft and the reader. The engine on this route produced checked cricket editorial around IPL GPT, a statistics product. The framing and the final call on every piece stayed with me.
Skills · Commands · Gates
The cricket engine is a pipeline of single-purpose parts: three slash commands, a shelf of skills, and a gate between every stage. The commands stay few on purpose. Deciding what runs is a conversation, so each series plan lives in a brief file that the build routes on. The effort went into skills that emulate research-led data storytelling, and the parts that earn the polish are the checks.
GT vs RCB · 30 April 2026
One question, followed from brief to published card. Step the run.
01 · The /match-note brief
Would Ahmedabad deserve the broadcast's fortress framing once GT's home record was compared with RCB's record at the same venue?
The record put the host barely above a coin-flip rate at its own ground.
My call: challenge the familiar line without claiming this was the smallest home edge in the league.
02 · The product query
IPL GPT's checked cache supplied GT at 13-11 in Ahmedabad through IPL 2025, a 54.2 per cent win rate. RCB stood at 3-3 there, or 50.0 per cent.
Three rows from the cache went into the card.
Boundary: these venue figures came from IPL GPT. I selected the comparison and its editorial frame.
03 · The cross-validate audit
The GT total differed from one external table: 24 matches and 13 wins against 22 and 12. The two missing matches were the 2022 and 2023 finals at the venue, one won and one lost. Including those playoffs reconciled the denominator while leaving the win rate near 54 per cent. RCB's 3-3 venue record matched the external source exactly.
“Minor divergence, acceptable, reconciled.”
04 · The correction gate
The first draft carried the cache's through-2025 head-to-head figure of 3-3. The stale scope was caught before publication. Current scorecards confirmed RCB's win on 24 April 2026, so the published context became 4-3, with the venue rates explicitly scoped through IPL 2025.
“Caught by user pushback before publish.”
Final gate: I checked the correction and approved the scoped wording.
Carousel published · essay unpublished
Five measures moved together. This edition ran the full loop: writer and editor passes, engineered charts, a voice check and the four-pass design review before the slides were stamped. The eight-slide carousel ran on Instagram; the long-form version stayed unpublished.
March to May 2026
The engine is easiest to judge in sequence. Four editions from the 2026 season: the head-to-heads began as seven slides built on tables; Matchup Lab cut an edition to five, one claim per screen; the chart vocabulary grew from bars to batting-shape radars; and the last is a match note built in Remotion, moving numbers over a still frame. Every one shipped through the same gates.
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