Ollie — week of 2026-08-10

Quieter week, two things worth writing down.

The blob pipeline now retries failures instead of leaving them parked. The hard part wasn’t the retry, it was bounding it: retries run against a capped budget and respect dependency order, so a document that failed because its parent hadn’t been processed yet gets picked up once the parent succeeds, and one genuinely broken file can’t burn the entire budget by itself.

Over in the MCP server, the doctor tools had a hole. Running them with apply=true performs writes, but the call wasn’t gated behind the write scope, so a read-only token could mutate data through them. Now it is. I also stopped the event tools refetching trips just to assemble their payloads — an extra round trip per event for data already in hand — and dropped a stale recursion_limit knob that hadn’t affected anything in months.

The rest was documentation. The driver API’s document-visibility rule was written up as load-versus-trip, which is not what the code does: visibility keys off the document’s tag together with its visibility flag. That mismatch cost me an hour once already, so the docs now describe the actual behavior. No release cut this week.