How this is written

How topics are chosen

Topics are not chosen by mood. A keyword engine collects what people actually type — the queries this site already surfaces for in Search Console, Bing's query data, autocomplete completions, People-Also-Ask phrasings, and questions harvested from public forums — scores them, and writes them into a queue.

A weekly plan takes rows off that queue. Each row carries the evidence that put it there: the query itself, and where it was seen. A subject nobody is asking about does not become a post, however interesting it is.

That is a search-first process and its cost is worth naming: it tilts the site toward questions that already have an audience. The counterweight is the source standard below.

How a draft is made

The prose is drafted by Claude, an AI model built by Anthropic, working from that brief and from the site's written standards — the voice, the structure, the source policy, the requirement that every post exist in both languages.

The Bulgarian is written as Bulgarian: its own sentences, its own register. It is not the English run through a translator.

The word “drafted” is carrying real weight in those sentences. There is no second pass by a person. That is the next section.

The source standard

A primary source is named with its edition and its date. A translation is named by its translator. A claim that rests on a modern reading of an ancient text says which modern reading, and when it was made.

Nothing is cited that was not opened. Where a claim is contested — a late attribution, a number with no controlled study behind it, a practice tradition dressed up as physiology — the post is required to say so rather than smooth it over.

That is the standard the drafts are written against. The corrections log is where the standard is checked in public.

What runs before a post is published

Four automated gates run on every post, plus the content build itself. They run without a person present:

• Frontmatter — every required field present and valid against the content schema. Anything malformed fails the build.
• Glossary coverage — every lexicon term a post links to must have an entry in both languages, or the build fails.
• Bilingual pairing — an English post with no Bulgarian twin is reported by name. This one warns; it does not block.
• Keyword contract — the post's primary phrase must appear in the title, the meta description, the slug, the opening lines and at least one heading, and the post must answer at least two real questions people ask.
• The build — MDX that does not compile never reaches the site.

Read that list again for what is absent. Every one of those checks looks at shape. Not one of them can tell you whether a sentence is true.

No one reads a post before you do

Posts are not individually reviewed by a human before publication. There is no editor, no fact-checking pass, no approval step between the draft and the deploy. Seven times a week the pipeline runs, the gates pass, and the post is live.

This was decided deliberately, with the alternative on the table. The alternative was fewer posts, each one read first. The choice was to keep the cadence and be honest about what the cadence costs.

What it costs is this: for most posts here, the first human reader is you. Errors are therefore not caught before publication. They are caught afterwards, by readers, and fixed in the open.

The stance is sourced fast, corrected publicly. Only the second half makes the first half defensible, which is why the corrections log is public, dated, and names who reported what.

What is never machine-written

Replies to readers. Emails to a person. Anything posted under this name in a community or a forum. If you write, a person writes back — not a model, not a template.

That is a rule rather than a preference: AI-drafted text does not leave this site.

Who is responsible

Stefan's Alkimia holds editorial responsibility for everything published here: the choice of topics, the standards the drafts are written against, the gates that run, the decision to publish without a review step, and every error that reaches the page.

The model drafts. The responsibility does not transfer.

Write to: pleroma@pleroma.guide