CampaignForge + ContentForge

Compliance is an angle-generation input, not a guardrail. The restricted-claims list is literally the cheat sheet for what converts — each restriction exists because the underlying psychological desire converts hard. Map every restriction to its desire family, the Layer-1 triggers that deliver that desire, and the tool-backed compliant framing that lands harder than the non-compliant original.

Disclaimers are conditional on ad-claim content, not platform/format. Tool-discovery framing ("See what you could qualify for") makes no standalone claim — the tool + 2–3K-word article lander carries all required disclosures with cited sources and freshness dates. In-ad disclaimers only trigger when the ad itself makes a specific claim (dollar amount, named government program, income claim). Tool-discovery framing is simultaneously the best-CTR AND most-compliant framing — not a coincidence.

Proprietary rankings from public gov data beats third-party whitelist. College Scorecard + IPEDS + BLS + VA data let us build our own defensible ranking system with full methodology transparency. No usage-rights gating, no publication bias, no expiration. Essentially "US News for online education" built from public gov data — an angle space competitors can't replicate.

Pattern-detect meta-specs. Three distinct questions (IPEDS cache, proprietary rankings, BLS wage refresh) had the same structural answer: authority-tier data cache with freshness tracking, cron-refreshed, read by Phase 5 with automated staleness halts. Consolidating into one authority-data-cache infrastructure spec beats three separate specs that repeat the same logic.

Persona re-load has empirical basis. Not superstition — output quality degrades every 4–5 turns as attention weight on the persona decays relative to accumulated context. Re-reading restores signal strength via token recency + repetition. CLAUDE.md now codifies: reload on strategic triggers + every ~5 turns in long sessions + every natural phase boundary. NOT every turn (wasteful, dilutes attention on actual work).

Tool-discovery framing is the workflow cheat-code. The same pattern that solves compliance (route substantiation to lander) also solves CTR (no in-ad disclaimer drag) and lead quality (friction-as-feature qualifies users). Three optimization goals aligned in one architectural choice.

Diagnose before adding. Session surfaced that Firecrawl skill wasn't firing, continuous-learning-v2 looked dormant, session-end was manual. Diagnosis revealed: Firecrawl was CLI-skill-vs-MCP-mismatch (fixable by rewiring deep-research); continuous-learning-v2 had 7.7MB of observations accumulated but observer.enabled: false was blocking the analysis phase (one config flag fix); session-end was genuinely manual (built scripts/session-end.sh safe multi-repo helper). Don't install — diagnose first. Most "missing" capabilities are broken capabilities.

Agents process early rules more heavily: Adding HARD RULES blocks at the top of each skill file ensures non-negotiable constraints are in the "hot zone" of agent attention. Rules buried mid-document get diluted by accumulated context.

Decision trees > prose guidance: Converting "consider X when Y" into "IF X THEN Y, OTHERWISE Z" produces more reliable agent behavior. Agents follow explicit branches; they interpret flexible guidance flexibly (which means inconsistently).

Anti-patterns are as powerful as patterns: Showing agents what NOT to produce (with concrete BAD examples and WHY explanations) creates hard boundaries. Without anti-patterns, agents gravitate toward "safe" generic output that passes no rules but also creates no value.

Subagent permissions are session-scoped, not inherited: Adding permissions to settings.local.json or project settings doesn't reliably propagate to subagents in don't-ask mode. Python/Bash fallback for file writes is the workaround. Some agents succeed, some don't — the behavior is inconsistent and needs investigation.

Sweet spot is 3-4 parallel agents: Beyond 4, prompt quality drops and merge review gets sloppy. The real constraint is file isolation, not compute. With 3 repos, the ceiling is ~5 agents if file boundaries are clean.

Feature branches prevent same-repo conflicts: Agents C and D in campaignforge-app worked on separate branches (feat/cost-session-manager, feat/pipeline-orchestrator), then merged sequentially. Zero conflicts.

Independent agents can converge on identical fixes: Both the a11y and Lighthouse agents independently identified and fixed the same CSS cascade issue (@layer base wrapping, :where() scoping) with byte-identical diffs. Merge was clean because Git detected identical changes.

CAPI Worker type errors are IDE-only: Cloudflare Workers have their own tsconfig with @cloudflare/workers-types. The IDE picks up the root tsconfig which doesn't know about Request/Response/fetch globals. Not real errors.

MDX body_html requires JSX-safe formatting: Raw HTML from JSON has nested block elements on same lines, bare <br> tags, and ~ chars parsed as strikethrough. Conversion script needed multi-pass formatting: self-close void tags, escape tildes to ~, and split every block element onto its own line.

Astro dynamic components need static imports: client:visible hydration fails with dynamic component references (NoMatchingImport). Must use conditional static rendering: {tc === 'EFCCalculator' && <EFCCalculator client:visible />}.

Parallel agents for tool implementations: 4 agents dispatched simultaneously, each handling 2-3 tools. All completed in ~17 minutes. Logic/data separation (*.logic.ts, *.data.ts) enabled clean parallelization with zero merge conflicts.

Astro 5 Content Layer API: entry.render() is gone. Use import { render } from 'astro:content' then render(entry). Content collections need glob() loader from astro/loaders.

shadcn-svelte + Tailwind v4: @apply border-border fails — Tailwind v4 doesn't know custom vars via @apply. Use @theme inline to declare all HSL color vars, then use raw CSS instead of @apply for base styles.

shadcn-svelte components need WithElementRef: The cn utility must also export WithElementRef and WithoutChildrenOrChild types for sidebar/rail components.

MDX in Content Collections: HTML (tables, callouts, step-lists) works inline in MDX. No need to convert to custom components yet — the prose CSS styles handle it.

Astro 5 Content Collections: Uses src/content.config.ts (not src/content/config.ts). The z import from astro:content shows deprecation warnings.

Tailwind v4: No tailwind.config.ts needed. Uses @tailwindcss/vite plugin. The @astrojs/tailwind integration conflicts — use the Vite plugin directly.

Remote agents failed: Overnight scaffold agents couldn't auth with GitHub. Local execution worked first try.