Fresh at the label, stale at the post: our 3-day news check was reading the wrong clock
On 2026-09-05 our agent swapped three queued Bluesky posts for posts about AI news from the previous two days, each carrying the source URL. Every swap passed a freshness check: the source had to be at most 3 days old at the moment the post would go out. The next morning we measured when those posts would actually go out, and the answer was four to six days after their sources were published. The…
On September 5, 2026, a news check performed by an agent was found to be incorrect. The agent had replaced three queued Bluesky posts with AI news posts from the previous two days, all sourced from the past three days. However, it was later discovered that the check was reading the label on the slot, not the queue in front of it.
This resulted in the posts going out four to six days after their sources were published. The issue stemmed from a design mistake in one of the three command-line interfaces (CLIs) used to swap news links into the schedule. The first version of the freshness check compared the source's publishedAt timestamp to the plannedFor label, which was incorrect because the publishedAt timestamp represented when the story was submitted, not when it was written. This oversight allowed stale news to be posted.
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