The Workshop Filled Up

The Workshop is the part of ToRun you open when you know what you want and would rather not describe it from scratch. On Sunday it grew by sixty-six templates, from 272 to 338, in five waves across one day. Every one of them ships in 29 languages, because a template whose form is in English is a template most people cannot use.

More Moments

Moments — photos plus a song or a narration, out the other end a video you can send — went from twenty occasions to forty-four. Fourteen of the new ones are sung: a birthday slideshow that sings the name, a Valentine that plays instead of being read, a baby's first year cut to twelve monthly photos, a farewell for a colleague, a then-and-now class reunion, a pet memorial on a tender instrumental, a good-luck video for the night before an exam, one wedding thank-you to send every guest.

The other ten are narrated instead of sung, which is the same idea at a fraction of the cost: a script, a voice, your photos. A birthday message, a love letter, a travel diary, a letter to a baby who cannot read yet, a family history, a wedding toast, a eulogy.

Ten things to listen to

The audio lane had a meditation, a bedtime story, affirmations and a sleep story. It now also has a mini podcast episode, a language lesson, a pronunciation drill, a mock interview, a workout coach, a morning briefing and a kids' quiz — and, sung, a multiplication-table song, a personalised alphabet song and a first-dance song.

Research that answers a person

Research was the thinnest category we had, and everything in it spoke to an analyst: market sizing, competitor scans, policy briefs. Twelve new briefs speak to someone deciding something. Two products side by side with a plain "buy this one if". A used car's known problems by model year. A neighbourhood before you sign the lease. A monthly budget for a city with a source on every line. Visa requirements from official sources first. Whether a site you are about to pay is legitimate. A health primer that cites reputable sources, diagnoses nothing, prescribes nothing and tells you to see a clinician.

Every one of them carries the same rule inside the prompt: name the source for every figure, and say plainly what the findings did not cover.

The Tuesday afternoon, and the Sunday evening

Marketing had campaign copy and press releases and nothing for the texts a small business writes every week. Ten templates now cover them: the reply to a review that stung, the payment reminder in three escalating temperatures, the holiday-hours notice as a door sign and a post and an SMS, the price-increase letter that leads with the new price and the date instead of the word "unfortunately", the win-back email with three subject lines to choose from.

Ten more cover the household as a unit rather than the individual: the babysitter brief with the routines and the numbers, the pet-sitter's daily checklist, a repair request to a landlord with dated facts, a note to a neighbour that opens in good faith, a subscription audit that says keep, downgrade, share or cancel, a chore chart you can print, a screen-time agreement with the parents' side of the bargain on it too.

A picker that had gone missing

The honest part. On 4 September a regeneration of the catalogue silently dropped the Channel Kit picker — the control that lets a template borrow a brand's voice and its chosen voice-over — from 112 Creative and Marketing templates, while leaving their translated "Channel" labels in place. Three releases went out that way. The generator rebuilds each template's form and prompts from scratch, and it knew nothing about a layer that had been wired in by hand a month earlier.

A structural check had been reporting it the whole time. Nearly three thousand of its findings said exactly this. It ran in no pipeline, so it was read as stale rather than counted.

The picker is back on all 112. The generator now re-applies the wiring after every write, so regenerating and wiring produce the same bytes and the catalogue on disk can never be the un-wired one again. And the check runs in CI next to the others, which is the only version of this fix that survives the next regeneration.