Harden Multi-Plant Update Workflow

August 27, 2026

Turned real multi-plant update friction into safer worksheets, reusable slug discovery, and idempotent recovery.

Tags: Abbey Root • plants • workflow

Harden Multi-Plant Update Workflow

Summary

The August 23 orchid update completed successfully, but it exposed avoidable friction in the batch worksheet. Its compact YAML was easy to misindent while adding prose, manually recreating the plant list was unnecessary, and a second application attempt produced failure messages even though the canonical update was already complete.

Abbey now treats those cases as workflow concerns rather than operator memory tests.

Accomplishments

• Generated worksheets use visibly nested photo lists and folded narrative placeholders that accept ordinary apostrophes and quotation marks.
• abbey plant update-batch validate checks completed worksheet structure without changing canonical workspaces.
• abbey plant update-batch slugs prints the reviewed plant list for reuse by validation and publication loops.
• Apply recognizes a complete existing update, leaves it unchanged, and distinguishes it from a partial or inconsistent state.
• The real August 23 worksheet passed the new validation and recovery paths for all eleven orchids.

Lessons Learned

A reviewable workflow needs to support recovery as deliberately as its happy path. Once the worksheet becomes the approved batch boundary, later commands should consume it directly and repeated execution should explain existing state rather than require reconstruction.

Next Steps

• Exercise the revised procedure during the next plant observation batch.
• Keep future changes grounded in actual publishing runs.