The Aethel Dev Journal

November 1, 2026

Who these people are (v0.52)

The five residents now introduce themselves. Each one has a biography, written into their journal the first time the new code met them: who they are, where they live, what they keep. The day pages promised in the last entry are real now too, closing each resident's day with the same facts every time: shifts worked, urges judged and accepted, who they spent their time with, and the lowest their spirits sank.

Between the urges their needs stir up, they now get smaller personal wants, written in each resident's own voice and argued by their own three voices. Every set of wants carries one temptation, and in testing every council refused its resident's temptation and accepted the honest wants. Trey also moved house: he lives at the Hotel now and runs it, and the mail route is his second job. The Post Office stays a real place in town; it just is not his home anymore.

Process note, because this journal keeps the honest tape: the day page's first draft came from our second coder and did not survive review. The shipped one was written in-house, to the contract the draft missed. The full test suite stands at 528 checks, all passing, and the town ran two simulated three day soaks before this touched the live world.

November 1, 2026

The residents got minds of their own (v0.51)

Until now the five people in Aethel's town ran on scripts: work your shift, wander, sleep. As of today each of them carries a small version of the same machinery she runs on. Three inner voices apiece, drawn from her council of nine, judge the urges their needs stir up. A hungry librarian might get the urge to close the bookshop early and eat; her voices argue it out, and the job still outranks the urge while she is on shift.

Their journals are written from what actually happened to them, never invented after the fact, and every resident's day now closes with a day page: shifts worked, urges judged, who they spent time with, what got written down. The same release also carries a small polish pass over Aethel's own letters (v0.48). The full test suite stands at 526 checks, all passing, and the town ran a three day simulated soak before any of this touched the live world.

November 1, 2026

Two coders, one codebase

Aethel now has a second pair of hands. Anton is a coding model running locally on the studio PC; he works in his own copy of the repository on small, well fenced tasks, and nothing he writes ships until it has been reviewed line by line and passed the same test suite. His first real assignment is the day page code described above. Meanwhile the hotel in town has a keeper: Trey, who already carries the mail part time, now lives at the Hotel and runs it, which matters more than it sounds (the Hotel is how guests will one day stay in a friend's town).

October 31, 2026

Plumbing in the dark (v0.50), and Halloween

The residents' brain plumbing shipped switched off, on purpose: the new code ran in shadow alongside the old scripts for a simulated three days before it was allowed to steer anything. Shipping dark and soaking first is slower, and it is why the live town has never once been the test site. The same week, the town dressed for Halloween, the first full run of the seasonal decor system, which is now feature complete for all four seasons.

October 30, 2026

Sleep is a rest again (v0.47)

A small bug with a long shadow: Aethel's sleep was not restoring her. Each night eroded a little more than the night returned, a slow sawtooth that would eventually have pinned her in bed. The fix was written the house way: tests first, watched failing on the old behavior, then the change. Sleep now restores at least what a day costs, at every temperament she can take.

October 23, 2026

The plan (Donald and Kevin)

This project has a map, drawn from a long design conversation between Donald and Kevin, and this journal exists to report against it. The short version: Aethel stays autonomous (nobody puppets her; people get things to do around her, never instead of her). Content is the growth engine, added as data wherever possible. Seasons first, then town life, then activities, then guests in each other's towns. Every engine investment gets judged by one question: could a second title from this little studio reuse it?