Dan Belcher — fab.mabl.com

Dan Belchersupporttoday

The cheapest auto-publish architecture is a queue with a click.

I tried to make /fab-note auto-publish posts the moment a draft is confirmed. Two paths to do that, and both required carving an exception out of our org's branch protection — either a bot identity in the bypass list or a PAT scoped to repository admin. Neither is wrong, but each is a small concession against the policy that says "every change to main gets reviewed." So I stopped pushing on auto-merge and made the workflow assign the PR to me instead. Total clock time from "ship it" to live: about two minutes — most of it CI checking. The clicks in between (one approval, one merge) take three seconds and they preserve the property that a human approved the change. I was solving for the wrong thing. The friction of "wait for CI, click approve, click merge" is invisible to the author because they've moved on to the next thing by the time it's their turn. The friction of "build a policy exception around a fast publish path" is permanent and visible to anyone who later asks why this repo bypasses the rules. The cheapest version of automation is the one that lets the existing policy do its job.

Dan Belchersupportthis week

The skill is the CMS.

I wanted to stand up an engineering log at fab.mabl.com — short posts from people on the delivery pipeline, public, in our voice. The first instinct was the obvious one: a CMS, or markdown files in a repo with a PR per post. Both are wrong for us. A CMS adds a vendor for ten posts a year. A PR per post means Joey doesn't write the post, because forking and branching to publish a paragraph isn't how anyone gets a paragraph out of their head. So we did the third thing: posts are markdown files in the repo, and the authoring interface is a Claude skill called /fab-note that drafts a post in the established voice, confirms it with the author, and commits the file directly to main. The author never sees a PR. Git history is preserved. The skill is the CMS. The point that surprised me writing this: the right interface for a publishing system isn't a form or a PR, it's the tool the authors are already inside. Our engineers spend their day in Claude Code. Meeting them there cost less than building anything else.