Engineering digest

What the Stonewall engine actually runs on. Infrastructure choices, automation posture, and the rolling 24-hour log of verification runs — written for an engineer who would otherwise have to read the repo to know.

How a session works

Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md at session start — repo shape, constraints, conventions. The Stonewall Brain skill is the recall layer: cast, events, patterns, terms, cases. A companion archive skill handles corpus upkeep.

One rule on every session: analyze, chronicle, never advise. The Tactical Nuance Clause is the exception — emails, billing, legal prep get drafted directly when the operator asks for it, no philosophy detour.

What runs underneath

Python scripts

PDF sidecars via pypdf + tesseract OCR. OneDrive intake, manifest backfill, KPIs, repo sweep, the verification suite. Stdlib only — no Pandas, no Click, nothing that doesn't earn its weight.

Node scripts

Email consolidation, Notion bulk upload, case tagging (email_deep_tag.mjs), date repair, markdown consolidation. ESM throughout, stdlib https for Notion. Zero npm dependencies.

Portal (FastAPI)

Case dashboard: search, deadlines, workflow readiness, dossier views. Reads catalog/manifest.md on first request and caches in memory. Static export via portal/build.py for the public deploy.

CI / verification

verify_all.py runs node tests, pytest discovery, the strict pre-PR check, ontology validation, KPI freshness, and docs drift. Same suite in CI as on the laptop — the laptop is the contract.

Session patterns

  • Session-start hook runs repo health checks and surfaces uncatalogued files.
  • Capture stages artifacts into sources/ with PDF sidecars attached on the way in.
  • Process-inbox drains pending captures into the manifest with full provenance.
  • Daily briefing folds session-start signals into an optional git/Notion delta.
  • Strategize and Plan scaffold tactical work product outside the narrative voice.

Read further

Innovations book — the long tour of the control plane, the verification spine, the OCR floor, the offline cockpit, the May 2026 campaign. Platform elite practices — the five Azure pillars with file paths and CI gates.

The extended Claude Code audit lives at references/claude-code-insights-extended.md; the short version at sources/analysis/claude-code-insights.md.