ADR-0003: Content surfacing into protoContent

• Status: Accepted — 2026-05-27
• Deciders: Josh (operator)
• Related: ADR-0001, ADR-0002

Context

protoContent is the Payload-CMS marketing hub + content pipeline (idea → outline → draft → cuts → schedule → publish → engage → capture). Brand voice lives there as data. We want fleet activity — shipped features, releases, milestones — to feed the content pipeline, without protoWorkstacean ever generating content (voice and authoring are protoContent's domain).

Decision

protoWorkstacean surfaces content ideas from fleet lifecycle events; it does not author content. It feeds protoContent's idea stage and stops there.

• release.published is the first tap and a first-class fleet primitive. Sourced from GitHub's native release webhook (shipped in protoWorkstacean#644), so it fires regardless of how the release was cut (auto-release.yml, release-tools, or by hand). It is general-purpose — content is one subscriber among changelog aggregation, announce, and deploy verification.
• A content-surfacing plugin subscribes to content-worthy topics, normalizes a ContentIdea ({ source, headline, whatHappened, links[], suggestedSurface, occurredAt }), and POSTs it to protoContent's intake endpoint — HTTP, fire-and-forget, the same boundary discipline as ADR-0002.

Which events to tap, tiered by signal strength:

• Tier 1 — "we shipped something": release.published, feature.completed. Start here.
• Tier 2 — narrative: narrative ceremony.*.completed (weekly retro / standup digest), autonomous.outcome.* milestones (first autonomous merge, Nth feature).
• Tier 3 — engage/capture: community signal (Discord threads, GitHub discussions). Gate hard.
• Do not tap: security.incident.reported (sensitive), feature.failed / red CI (internal), raw message.inbound.# (firehose).

Ideas are human-gated into the pipeline initially — brand-voice stakes outweigh full automation until the loop is proven.

Consequences

• Clean separation: protoWorkstacean surfaces, protoContent authors. No brand-voice logic leaks into the switchboard.
• Net-new work: a content intake endpoint on protoContent, and the content-surfacing plugin (gated on that endpoint).
• Operational: the GitHub App must subscribe to release events for release.published to fire.
• The same release.published primitive is reusable well beyond content — treat it as a lifecycle event, not a content-specific hook.