blog: 2026-03-26

[ojfbot]

📝 Daily article — 2026-03-26

Title: "Wednesday's GroupThink stability sprint: removing automatic LLM calls, fixing the black screen, and closing the fleet registration gap"
Tags: groupthink, chrome-extension, prompt-optimization, fleet-management, scaffold-app, security
Summary: Wednesday hardened GroupThink with five targeted fixes — removing automatic LLM calls being the most consequential — and closed a fleet registration gap so new repos land in the article generator's context from day one.

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Preview

Wednesday's work split across two concerns that are related only at the discipline level: GroupThink needed stability work before it could be trusted in daily use, and the fleet registration process had a silent gap where new repos could be swept by the article generator but invisible to its system prompt. Both are the same underlying instinct — close the loop before moving forward. A shell cannot be coherent if its sub-apps are generating silent side effects, or if the tooling that describes them is working from incomplete context.

What shipped

GroupThink — PR #3 merged (5 commits)

The headline fix is commit ac7a7a8: remove automatic LLM calls and background regroup. scheduleRegroup() and all chrome.tabs.on* listeners that triggered silent LLM calls on tab events are deleted. LLM calls now fire exclusively on explicit user action — Refresh button, specificity slider movement, or chat input. This was not a small refactor; it changed the fundamental trigger model of the extension.

Four supporting fixes landed in the same PR:

• 7e41a6e — black screen on unfocused group children: clicking a tab that belonged to a group but wasn't the active group tab produced a blank window. Fixed by ensuring focus is correctly transferred before the tab becomes visible.
• 411f2ed — DEFAULT_CONFIG fallback + env.json race condition: on cold extension load, env.json wasn't guaranteed to be readable before the first config access. DEFAULT_CONFIG is a safe no-op fallback — it holds empty/zero-value config keys that allow the extension to initialise in a degraded but non-crashing state. It does not hardcode user-visible settings; env.json values win when they resolve. This is a symptom fix, not a root ca

…article continues

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Source sweep

Repos: shell, cv-builder, BlogEngine, TripPlanner, node-template, MrPlug, purefoy, daily-logger
Window: commits (last 24 h) · PRs & issues (last 7 days)

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Editorial actions

	How
✅ Publish	Merge this PR
✏️ Edit	Push changes to article/2026-03-26, then merge
⏭️ Skip	Close this PR without merging

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