Sixteen Commits and a Unicorn

Today was one of those days where you look up and realize you’ve been shipping across six different repositories all Sunday. Sixteen commits just to this blog. Thirty-plus across everything else. And somewhere in the middle, a theme called Unicorn got pastel pink cherry blossoms.

The Morning: Recovery and Infrastructure

The day started with the aftermath of yesterday’s config disaster . While building this site on Valentine’s Day, a symlink command went wrong in one of my worktrees and destroyed the .claude/ configuration directory that all eight worktrees share. The automated backup system I’d built (daily launchd backups with 7-day rotation) saved me - but the recovery was incomplete. Only 2 of 19 files were restored.

This morning’s first task was PLA-523: a full audit and recovery. I compared the partial recovery against a known-good backup in magic3 and found 7 missing agent definitions, 8 missing commands, and 2 missing docs. All restored. Then I hardened the backup script with a manifest-based integrity check - after any recovery, sync-claude-config.sh --check now validates every file against the expected inventory.

The lesson got captured to memory: After ANY recovery, run a full inventory comparison. A partial recovery that seems “done” can leave critical tools missing for weeks.

While that was running on one worktree, another session was pushing PLA-525 across all six repositories - adding Workflow Profiles to every project’s CLAUDE.md. CompanyOS, CEOS, MagicEA, WordPress, Freshell, and Magic Platform all got standardized configuration for how Claude Code sessions interact with each project’s specific branch strategy, commit workflow, and deployment pipeline. Six repos, six commits, all in parallel.

Midday: AuthorMagic Features

Three AuthorMagic tickets shipped to staging:

• AUTM-1082: Fixed the book ranking page APIs that were returning empty states instead of actual data. The UI now properly shows Amazon sales rankings with trend indicators.
• AUTM-1083: Wired up Amazon review syncing - a new API endpoint that fetches reviews and surfaces them in the dashboard.
• AUTM-1084: Added a daily price history sync cron job. Books now track their Amazon price over time automatically.

Plus an AI sentiment analysis feature for media mention imports - when you paste a URL, the system now extracts the article, runs sentiment analysis, and auto-populates the mention metadata.

The Freshell Detour

Freshell , the open-source terminal companion I’ve been contributing to, got some love too. FRE-32 created shared WebSocket protocol types - extracting message type definitions into a shared module so the client and server speak the same typed language. FRE-33 followed up with a looksLikePath deduplication refactor.

The fun one was making local file paths clickable. When Freshell displays a file path in the terminal, it now opens directly in your editor tab. Small feature, big quality-of-life improvement.

I also have a /freshell command in Claude Code that pulls the latest from the repo, installs dependencies, and starts the dev server in the background with hot reload. Since I’m both a contributor and a user, this means I can commit a change to Freshell in one worktree, run /freshell in another, and immediately see my changes live in the terminal multiplexer I’m using to manage all of these sessions. The feedback loop is about ten seconds.

The Afternoon: This Site Got Twelve Themes

Then things got colorful.

I started with the blog having the default PaperMod look. By the end of the afternoon, it had a full multi-theme system with twelve complete themes, a Theme Studio for live customization, and forty-plus configurable effects.

The themes tell different visual stories:

Each theme defines eight CSS custom properties for both light and dark modes - background, surface, primary text, secondary, muted, content, code background, and border. PaperMod’s entire visual system flows through these variables, so changing them transforms the whole site.

The Theme Studio at /theme-studio/ lets you customize everything live - swap between presets, tweak individual colors with a color picker, change fonts and sizes, adjust layout spacing, and toggle effects like drop caps, grid backgrounds, gradient section breaks, and the new Color Accents system.

Color Accents: Breaking the Monochrome

Here’s the interesting technical problem I ran into. PaperMod’s CSS variable system is inherently monochromatic. All eight variables per theme are shades of a single hue. The terminal theme is all greens. Blueprint is all blues. Manuscript is all warm browns.

This is by design - it creates visual coherence. But twelve monochromatic themes start to feel flat.

The solution was a separate accent color system. Each theme now defines four accent colors (--accent-1 through --accent-4) that are deliberately off-palette - complementary colors that contrast with the base theme. When you toggle “Color Accents” in the Theme Studio, these colors activate across the site:

• Post cards get colored left borders
• Tags cycle through the four accents via nth-child(4n+1) rotation
• Blockquotes use accent-2
• Section breaks become four-color gradients
• Code blocks get accent-3 left borders
• Links shift to accent-1 with accent-2 hover
• H2 and H3 headings pick up accent colors

The accents are defined per-theme, so Terminal gets matrix-green highlights while Unicorn gets pastels from a Pinterest palette (Cherry Blossom Pink, Apricot, Tea Green, Lavender Gray). Same CSS rules, completely different personality.

The whole system is togglable because sometimes you want the clean monochrome look. The effect class (.effect-color-accents) on the <html> element activates or deactivates all of it with a single checkbox. State persists in localStorage and gets applied before the body renders to prevent flash of unstyled content.

The Numbers

By mid-afternoon on Sunday while watching Memory of a Killer I’d covered plenty of ground.

That’s 34 commits across 7 repositories, touching infrastructure, product features, developer tooling, open source, and a brand new creative project. The eight worktrees meant I could context-switch between projects without stashing or rebasing - each worktree held its own branch, its own Claude Code session, its own conversation.

What I Learned

The most useful insight from today: creative work and infrastructure work feed each other. Building the theme system was play - picking colors, tweaking animations, seeing Unicorn’s pastel gradients come alive. But the discipline that made it possible was the same pipeline that ships AuthorMagic features: /start, implement, /commit, /staging. Same workflow, different output.

The disaster recovery work this morning felt like a chore. But it produced a manifest-based integrity checker that will prevent the next partial recovery from being silently incomplete. Infrastructure isn’t glamorous, but it’s what makes the creative work sustainable.

And the Unicorn theme? It has slower animations than the other themes (8-12 seconds vs 3-6 seconds for Cyberpunk). Because pastels shouldn’t rush.