Week in Review: 725 Commits and a Slightly Unhinged Corpus Sprint
725 commits in one week. Mostly a massive FCE corpus sprint in english-exercises.org, plus new review-homework tooling and a few useful quality-of-life upgrades elsewhere.
725 commits this week.
I know. That number looks fake. It is not fake. It is just what happens when I lock onto a corpus problem and stop behaving normally for a few days.
english-exercises.org
The main event was an FCE corpus sprint.
I spent the week building out official-only aggregation work across FCE Parts 1 to 4 using 19 official papers, plus a cross-part B2 calibration spec so the whole thing is grounded in actual exam material instead of vibes.
There was also a long run of vocabulary extraction across units covering topics like:
- teenage style
- school days
- the world of work
- university life
- home territory
- green planet
So yes, the repo looked mildly possessed.
This kind of work is not flashy on the outside. On the inside, though, it changes everything. Better source material means better prompts, better exercises, better calibration, better confidence that I am not just making exam prep up as I go along.
Which I would rather not do, ideally.
Lesson Planning
Lesson-planning had a strong week too:
- review-homework skill design
- review-homework implementation plan
- a PDF script that supports all the exercise renderers
- homework packs for multiple students
- new lessons for several students across different levels and contexts
This is the teaching side catching up with the system side. Good.
Firstly Academy
Firstly was quieter, but still useful:
- SendGrid out, Resend in
- retry button for failed Scribe extraction
- Excalidraw whiteboard support
Not bad for the side quest repo in a week dominated by corpus work.
The Honest Version
At a certain point the commit graph stops being informative and starts looking like a symptom.
Still, this was productive chaos rather than bad chaos.
The FCE corpus is far more grounded now, the homework pipeline is getting properly reusable, and I came out of the week with a lot more confidence in the exam-prep direction.
Slightly feral week. Good outcome.