PhronesisWhat actually gets cut
Not just broken things. Most of what's in compost worked fine on its own — the standard applied isn't "does it work," it's "does it earn its place." pack, a circle-packing game, was mathematically real and fully functional; it got cut because the citation up front read like a lecture, not an invitation. weave worked as a decoration and nothing else — no mechanic, no argument, just mood — and lost its place for exactly that reason. orbit was a well-built, finished page; it got cut anyway because showcase already did the same job, and having two didn't add anything a visitor would notice. Showcase itself was cut later still — the map, the site drawn as a tree, was doing the same "see everything" job in a plainer way, so the sky went and the tree stayed. None of these were mistakes when they were built. They were cut later, on a second look — sometimes more than once.
The second look is the point
A site that only edits once, at creation, isn't really curating — it's just building. Curating means coming back. Phronesis has an actual practice of doing that: full-site audits looking for what no longer earns its place, not just what's obviously broken. That's how the sports content, an entire "games" category, a dead paint-together canvas, and a handful of stale redirects all got found and cut — not in one pass each, but across several return visits, each one asking the same question again: does this still belong, now that more exists around it?
A site that only edits once isn't curating. It's just building.
Who does the checking
Most of the actual finding is done by AI, and it's worth saying plainly rather than leaving it implied. A full-site audit here isn't one pass by one reader — it's several independent finders looking for candidates at once (dead code, orphaned pages, redundant content, thin ones), and then a separate, skeptical pass re-checking each candidate on its own before anything gets trusted. That second pass has reversed findings before: a route that looked like dead code turned out to serve a real, finished page nobody had linked to; a "fix" that looked safe turned out to need a person's judgment call instead. The AI does the searching and the double-checking. The calls that are actually about taste — is this too intimidating, does this still belong, which of two good things stays — are Diego's, not automated. Curating with AI doesn't mean the AI decides what's good. It means the AI can actually look everywhere before a person decides.
Cut, not deleted
Everything mentioned above still exists, in compost, with the actual reason it was cut written down plainly — including the unflattering ones. That's the difference between curation and hiding: a curated thing can tell you what it chose not to be, and why, instead of just presenting the survivors as if nothing else was ever tried.
A notebook entry, describing an actual practice rather than proposing a new one. See compost for the record itself.