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Changelog

v0.5.0

New features, content, and improvements to the observatory.

Your Feed — Curation as Conversion Primitive

Apr 28, 2026

v0.5.0

By

FeatureFeedWatchlists

Subscriptions now drive a personalized feed. Click Follow on any place, corridor, brief, or meeting reading; /feed merges those direct watches with adjacent activity — briefs covering watched places, readings on watched corridors — recency-sorted into one stream with reason attribution per row.

Follow on every artifact

Every place dossier, corridor signal, signal brief, and meeting reading now carries a Follow toggle in its hero. The state flips optimistically — instant feedback, server reconciles in the background. Anonymous click routes to /login with the path and intent preserved; sign in and pick up exactly where you were.

/feed — your personalized stream

The feed merges five activity sources on every visit:

  • Direct watches — anything you've followed shows up in the stream
  • Meetings on watched places — a city you track had a planning meeting
  • Meetings on watched corridors — a corridor reading dropped
  • Briefs covering watched places — a named pattern names a place you follow
  • Briefs covering watched corridors — the same, at corridor scope

Each row carries a reason attribution ("Brief covering a place you follow"), so the why is visible alongside the what. The stream isn't a flat list of titles — it's the temporal organism made personal.

/account/watchlists — manage in one view

Subscriptions grouped by type (Places · Corridors · Named patterns · Meeting readings). One-click unfollow on any row. Empty state guides into the indices.

What this enables

The same subscription primitive that drives the in-product feed will drive the Weekly Signal newsletter cadence. One follow shapes both surfaces. Future paid intelligence tiers will layer on top of this same primitive — your watchlist becomes the personalization spine.

Watchlists + Auth — Phase 1 Complete

Apr 28, 2026

v0.4.0

By

FeatureAuthWatchlists

The observatory now recognizes returning readers. Sign in with Google or a password, and your watchlists persist across sessions and devices.

Watchlists

Mark any place dossier, corridor, meeting reading, or signal brief for ongoing attention. The watchlist surface at /account/watchlists collects everything you're tracking in one view. Named watchlists let you organize by project, jurisdiction, or any frame that suits the work.

The signal is dense. The civic record moves in multiple directions at once. Watchlists give you a stable vantage point while the field shifts beneath it.

Auth

  • Email + password — standard account with confirmation flow
  • Google OAuth — one click, no password to manage
  • ProfileMenu — avatar in the header shows sign-in state; dropdown links to watchlists, account, and sign out
  • Session persistence — Supabase Auth handles the cookie lifecycle; server components read the session at request time so no hydration flash

Content gates

Authentication never gates content. Every place dossier, corridor analysis, meeting reading, and signal brief is publicly readable. Auth is infrastructure for persistence (watchlists) and communication (newsletter and future alert cadences) — not a paywall.

Semantic Search + MCP Agent Discovery

Apr 28, 2026

v0.3.0

By

FeatureSearchMCPGEO

Two new access paths to the civic intelligence graph — one for human readers, one for AI agents.

Semantic search

/search accepts natural-language queries and returns ranked results from the full content corpus — place dossiers, corridors, meeting readings, and signal briefs.

The ranking is powered by 1024-dimensional Voyage AI embeddings stored as halfvec in Supabase's pgvector extension. Queries embed at inference time via Voyage 4 Lite (the asymmetric query model); documents embed at build time via Voyage 4 (the asymmetric index model). The same embedding space makes the match precise without requiring exact terminology.

Ask "aquifer recharge restrictions" and surface the Minneola water ordinance. Ask "density corridor commercial pressure" and find the US-27 corridor analysis. The query vocabulary doesn't need to match the source text — meaning does.

MCP discovery server

/.well-known/mcp.json exposes a public read-only MCP server for AI agents. Declared tools:

  • describe_zoning_signal — what this observatory is and what it covers
  • list_cities — all place dossiers with signal summary
  • list_corridors — cross-municipal corridor analyses
  • current_named_patterns — active signal patterns from the regional synthesis
  • meeting_index — meeting readings filtered by jurisdiction and date range
  • describe_place and describe_corridor — lens-aware projection per cognitive position
  • semantic_search — query the content corpus by meaning

Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini can now locate and traverse the observatory's intelligence graph without requiring a human intermediary. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is first-mover territory in civic intelligence; this surface is the mechanism.

Cross-link resolver

The bidirectional cross-link resolver connects related artifacts across the corpus. A meeting reading for Clermont's planning commission references the Clermont place dossier and the US-27 corridor automatically. Place dossiers surface related meeting readings and corridor analyses inline. The graph densifies as content grows.

The Field — Index Pages and Lens System

Apr 28, 2026

v0.2.0

By

FeatureNavigationDesign

Four index pages and the core navigation system that structures how the observatory is traversed.

The Field (homepage)

/ is the observatory's entry point — a visual field constellation showing the civic intelligence graph as a spatial arrangement. Places, corridors, meetings, and briefs appear as positioned nodes in the field with signal-strength indicators. The layout algorithm distributes by signal intensity and proximity relationships, not alphabetical order.

Four index pages

Each content type has a dedicated index organized for its specific material:

  • Places (/places) — place dossiers by signal strength, with jurisdiction, reading count, and development pressure summary
  • Corridors (/corridors) — cross-municipal economic topology analyses, with municipal crosscurrents and infrastructure unlock status
  • Readings (/meetings) — meeting readings in reverse chronological order, with jurisdiction, meeting type, and signal extraction count
  • Briefs (/briefs) — named-pattern essays in publication order

Lens system

The lens switcher on index pages toggles the analytical frame: Signal (intelligence extracted), Development (physical-change pressure), Infrastructure (unlock and constraint conditions), and Policy (regulatory direction). The underlying data is identical across lenses — the frame shifts, not the evidence.

Design chrome

The full observatory aesthetic is live: dark field plate for navigation and editorial surfaces, parchment plate for reading surfaces, signal gold (amber) for active state, teal for navigation chrome. Cormorant Garamond carries page identity; IBM Plex Mono carries instrument metadata; Inter carries interface.

The Corpus Opens — Depth + Design System

Apr 28, 2026

v0.1.5

By

FeatureContentDesign

The launch surface shipped with one place dossier and one corridor. This release expands the corpus to four places, five named patterns, and three citation-grade meeting readings — and the entire visual system is now on the canonical Zoning Signal aesthetic.

Content depth

  • Four place dossiers — Clermont, Minneola, Groveland, Leesburg. Each carries eight-projection lens content (synthesis plus seven analytical positions), a twelve-month signal drift, a six-node provenance chain, signal-strength score (0–100), and the city's regulatory state under Florida's SB 180.
  • Five named-pattern briefsThe Quiet Revolution on Highway 27 · The Self-Storage Canary · The Six-Month Board Flip · The Grandfather Window · The Bellwether Gas Station. Each names a recurring shape in the regional record, anchored in real votes, real dates, real attribution.
  • Three meeting readings — Clermont's October 2025 7-Eleven denial (Wellness Way Design Standards enforced unanimously), Minneola's September 2025 gas-station 4-0 denial at the Hancock/CR-561A residential gateway, and Leesburg's December 2025 Planning Commission. Each follows the Citation Scaffold structure (BLUF · statistic · attribution · structured list · FAQPage schema).
  • Field Atlas at /field/south-lake-florida — the regional showpiece. Hero stat panel, regional map, twelve-month drift strip, places-in-field grid, corridors-in-motion grid, six-node visual provenance trail, MainThread coda.

Design system

The Anthropic claude.ai/design team built a complete brand system. We ported it whole: deep charcoal + signal gold + parchment palette tokens, three typefaces (Cormorant Garamond display, IBM Plex Mono instrument, Inter interface), and sixteen component primitives — Header, Footer, LensSwitcher (seven-lens), SourceTrail (visual provenance chain), DriftTimeline (twelve-month strip), StatPanel, MapPlate, PlaceCard, CorridorCard, and others. Maps generate via ChatGPT Image 2.0 with the prompt grammar codified at /knowledge/design/MAP-ASSET-PIPELINE.md — the cartographic-imagery skill at intelligence-core/skills/cartographic-imagery/ is the universal craft, parameterized for Zoning Signal here.

Per-page social cards

Every place, corridor, brief, and meeting URL now generates its own OpenGraph card at request time — title, signal score, signal state line, all on the dark observatory plate. Sharing /briefs/grandfather-window on Slack or Twitter produces a Grandfather-Window-specific preview, not a generic site card. Favicon and apple-touch-icon use the woven-thread signal mark.

Trust pages elevated

/method, /sources, and /built-by-mainthread graduate from stub placeholders to substantive editorial. The Method essay names the four artifacts, the eight cognitive positions, the four-step source pipeline (Harvest → Standardize → Synthesize → Publish), and the validation discipline. Sources enumerates seventy-seven harvested documents across four cities and three planning boards, with verifiable portal links per jurisdiction.

Zoning Signal Observatory — First Publish

Apr 27, 2026

v0.1.0

By

Launch

The Zoning Signal Observatory is live.

What this is

A civic intelligence observatory for places in motion. The agendas, minutes, staff reports, and planning records that shape a region's future — read as a living atlas. The civic record moves before the market reacts; this surface makes that movement legible.

The observatory publishes four artifact types:

  • Place dossiers — per-jurisdiction synthesis: current reading, signal strength, primary forces, development pressure zones, key entities (developers, attorneys, recurring parcels), source trail
  • Corridor analyses — cross-municipal economic topology: corridor thesis, pressure map, municipal crosscurrents, infrastructure unlocks, commercial gravity, residential expansion
  • Meeting readings — temporal artifacts: one per harvested meeting, plain-English summary, signal extraction, entity map, delta from prior reading
  • Signal briefs — named-pattern essays: one recurring shape in the civic record per essay, anchored in evidence from the regional corpus

The pipeline behind it

The intelligence comes from the NLAA (Natural Language Agent Application) at zoning-signal/ — a harvest and synthesis pipeline operating across 19 Lake County jurisdictions since January 2024. 77 documents harvested. Four city syntheses. One regional synthesis. The observatory is the publishing surface; the NLAA is the engine.

The domain

zoningsignal.com — a standalone TLD. The decision not to use a subdomain of mainthread.ai is intentional: this surface builds its own search authority on civic-intelligence terms, not on the studio's domain. MainThread attribution is through JSON-LD entity graph and the footer, not the URL.

SEO and AI-agent discoverability

The observatory ships with full structured data (JSON-LD on every page), an explicit AI-crawler allow list in robots.txt, llms.txt and llms-full.txt for AI indexers, and the MCP discovery server at /.well-known/mcp.json. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) alongside traditional SEO from day one — not retrofit.

This is a live system. Content grows as the pipeline harvests. The signal sharpens with each reading.