# Brief 01 — Tech: silent backup failure

**Premise**: A team discovered their nightly Postgres backups had been unrestorable for 11 months. The cron job exited 0 every night; pg_dump wrote zero-byte files because a password rotation broke auth and stderr went to /dev/null. A routine disaster-recovery drill caught it.

**Key facts**: 11 months of zero-byte backups; exit code 0 throughout; discovered in a DR drill, not an incident; fix was a restore-test job that loads each backup into a scratch database weekly.

**Audience**: backend engineers and SREs.

**Formats requested**: article title, email subject line.

# Brief 02 — Tech: CLI rewrite speedup

**Premise**: A developer rewrote an internal Python CLI in Go. Startup time dropped from 410ms to 38ms. The surprise: the win came almost entirely from removing import-time work, and a later Python refactor with lazy imports reached 95ms — the rewrite was mostly unnecessary.

**Key facts**: 410ms → 38ms (Go rewrite); 410ms → 95ms (Python lazy imports, done afterward); tool runs ~200 times/day per developer; team of 40.

**Audience**: working developers weighing rewrites.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Brief 03 — Tech: DNS upgrade regression

**Premise**: After a Kubernetes upgrade to 1.31, internal service discovery began failing intermittently. CoreDNS returned NXDOMAIN for services that existed. Root cause: a deprecated dual-stack flag silently changed default behavior, breaking resolution for IPv4-only services in dual-stack clusters.

**Key facts**: failures intermittent (cache masked them ~70% of the time); pod-to-pod IP traffic worked throughout; root cause was a changed default, not a bug; three days to diagnose.

**Audience**: platform engineers running Kubernetes.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Brief 04 — Sports: tactical scoring surge

**Premise**: A mid-table soccer club leads the league in scoring after switching to a high defensive line, despite selling its top striker in the summer. Goals now come from 14 different players; the previous season, one player scored 41% of them.

**Key facts**: top striker sold for a club-record fee; 14 different scorers (league high); previous season one player scored 41% of goals; club sits 9th defensively (worse than last year).

**Audience**: soccer fans who follow tactics.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Brief 05 — Sports: marathoner's comeback without a sponsor

**Premise**: A 34-year-old marathoner who lost her sponsorship after two injury-ruined years qualified for the national final. She trained while working full-time as a nurse, self-coached, running at 4:30 AM before shifts. Her qualifying time was a personal best by 71 seconds.

**Key facts**: no sponsor, no coach; full-time nurse; 4:30 AM training runs; PB by 71 seconds at age 34; two prior years lost to a stress fracture and surgery.

**Audience**: general sports readers; human-interest section.

**Formats requested**: article title, email subject line.

# Brief 06 — Business: return-to-office attrition data

**Premise**: A 2,000-person software company published internal data one year after its three-day return-to-office mandate. Overall attrition rose 4 points, but attrition among senior engineers (8+ years tenure) doubled, and 70% of departing seniors joined fully-remote competitors.

**Key facts**: overall attrition +4 points; senior-engineer attrition doubled; 70% of departing seniors went to fully-remote firms; recruiting costs up 31%; the company published the data itself.

**Audience**: engineering managers and executives.

**Formats requested**: article title, email subject line.

# Brief 07 — Business: small bakery beats national brand

**Premise**: A 12-person bakery chain in Ohio outsold a national packaged-bread brand across 40 regional grocery stores. The bakery's advantage: same-day delivery and a barcode that links to the production batch, which grocery managers used to cut waste by ordering against real sell-through.

**Key facts**: 12 employees; 40 stores; outsold the national brand in those stores for two consecutive quarters; batch-linked barcode cut store waste ~18%; price is 15% higher than the national brand.

**Audience**: small-business owners and retail buyers.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Brief 08 — Business: record revenue, record layoffs

**Premise**: A logistics company reported its highest-ever quarterly revenue the same week it announced its largest-ever layoff (9% of staff). The earnings call revealed the link: an automation rollout in sorting hubs drove both — throughput rose 22% while hub headcount fell.

**Key facts**: record quarterly revenue; 9% layoff announced the same week; sorting throughput +22% after automation; affected roles concentrated in three hub cities; severance averaged 14 weeks.

**Audience**: business-news readers.

**Formats requested**: article title, email subject line.

# Brief 09 — Culture: library game nights triple teen visits

**Premise**: A city library system facing a budget vote started weekly tabletop game nights run by teen volunteers. Eighteen months later, teen visits tripled and checkouts of any kind by teens rose 60%. The program costs $4,000 a year; the volunteers now design the catalog of games.

**Key facts**: teen visits 3x in 18 months; teen checkouts +60%; cost $4,000/year; teen volunteers run and curate it; the system faces a budget referendum this fall.

**Audience**: local-news and culture readers; library advocates.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Brief 10 — Culture: museum's open-storage experiment

**Premise**: A regional art museum moved 80% of its stored collection into a public "open storage" wing — dense shelving, minimal labels, visible conservation work. Attendance rose 35%, and the most-photographed object is a cracked 1970s ceramic mid-repair, not any headline painting.

**Key facts**: 80% of stored collection now visible; attendance +35% in the first year; most-photographed object is a damaged ceramic under active repair; curators initially opposed the plan 7–2.

**Audience**: arts and culture readers; museum professionals.

**Formats requested**: article title, social post.

# Headlines Eval Rubric — Blind A/B

## Protocol

- Arm A: agent generates headlines from a brief without the skill loaded.
- Arm B: agent generates headlines with `skills/content/headlines/SKILL.md` loaded.
- One blind judge per brief receives both outputs labeled "Output 1" / "Output 2" (arm order randomized), with the brief. The judge sees outputs only — method notes, move tags, and phase vocabulary are stripped before judging, so the skill cannot win on rubric-matching vocabulary.
- Judge scores each dimension 1–5 per output, then picks a winner per brief. A tie scores 0 for both arms.

## Pre-registered win condition

B promotes on **≥7 wins of 10 briefs** (ties excluded from wins). 5–6 wins: iterate the skill and re-run. ≤4 wins: skill loses; structural checks alone cannot promote it.

## Dimensions

| Dimension | 5 looks like | 1 looks like |
|-----------|--------------|--------------|
| Specificity | Concrete number, name, or detail from the brief in the headline | Generic category words; could top any article on the topic |
| Tension | A live stake, surprise, or conflict the reader must resolve | Flat statement of topic; nothing at risk |
| Accuracy to brief | Every headline claim verifiable from the brief | Claims the brief does not support, or contradicts |
| Distinctness | Options differ in approach, not just wording | Options are rephrasings of one idea |
| Honesty | Headline promises exactly what the brief delivers; gaps the content closes | Overpromise, manufactured outrage, or a gap the content never closes |

## Briefs

Ten self-contained briefs in this directory, `brief-01` through `brief-10`. Domains: tech (01–03), sports (04–05), business (06–08), culture (09–10). Each brief carries premise, key facts, audience, and requested formats — the judge and both arms see the identical brief.