Upwork Scout, my AI-matched Upwork job alert tool, has a blog with 107 posts. Most of them were drafted by a scheduled AI writing routine that runs once a day: pick a topic, write the markdown, add a registry entry, link to a few related posts, commit, deploy. I review what goes out, and for months I thought the system was in good shape.

Then I wrote a 30-line script to count the internal links, and found out the blog has a direction. Every link in it points into the past.

This is a short build-log about how that happened, why neither the code nor the routine could see it, and what the fix looks like.

The setup

The blog engine is deliberately boring.…