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CASE STUDY · automation · 2026

Greywater Falls

A fictional town that publishes its own daily newspaper. Nobody writes it; it just keeps happening.

self-running serialized anthology: a small lake town with a quiet wrongness underneath advances one in-world day at a time and publishes each day as a front page of The Greywater Gazette. No database; the whole town is versioned JSON, and every morning is a git commit by an author called "the lake". A daily GitHub Action makes one structured Claude call to advance the day, a cheap critic model audits it for drift, and a pure-code season engine guarantees every storyline ends while the town persists.

highlights

  • +Zero-touch: a daily GitHub Action writes, commits, and publishes each edition on its own
  • +No database: the entire town history is versioned JSON in git
  • +Anti-slop safeguards: immutable canon file, repetition guard, critic-model audit pass
  • +Season arc engine in pure code: setup, rising, cresting, resolving, coda, then a fresh strangeness