- Owner: Michael Houck
- Client: jeff-evans (Mantis Venture Capital)
- Trigger: Blake Emal escalation, Megaphone thread p1787251080448699
- Status: APPROVED and APPLIED to prod
Decision
Approved the rebuilt rule-card.json for jeff-evans: 13 bans (was 10) plus 5
workflow gates (was 0), and a hedging carve-out. Synced to prod, verified in
the JS runtime that all 13 patterns compile and fire.
Why
Blake escalated that Jeffrey’s posts were not hitting his mark and theorized Hermes was ingesting unapproved Notion drafts. That mechanism was disproved in code: unapproved drafts reach only the anti-repetition list, never voice.
The real cause was that Jeffrey’s feedback had no path into the machine at all.
feedback_entries for him held ZERO rows, and that table feeds both the
drafting prompt and the MEGA-1658 boundary checker. His rule card was frozen
2026-07-28 and built from June documents.
Channel distribution explains why the team believed he had gone quiet:
| Channel | Volume from Jeffrey | Read by pipeline |
|---|---|---|
| 89 messages, 40 substantive | no | |
| Read.ai interviews | 8 calls, 344 turns | no |
| Notion comments | ~21 | partial |
| Slack | 1 message ever | no consumer |
What changed on the card
Workflow gates added (none existed before). These are process gates, not text patterns, and are the highest-value part:
- G1 portfolio founder sign-off: permission before drafting AND approval of final text, both performed by Jeffrey. Source: “I’d have to get the founders permission” [2026-01-06], the two-step description [2026-02-13], and the email “I should get sign off before posting. Shinkei had some issues” [2026-01-29]. Unenforced for 7 months.
- G3 LP-update confidentiality: LP updates are a topic source only. No company metrics, no “top companies in the fund” ranking framing. Fiduciary.
- G4 fundraise-active suppression: while a fund is raising, block content surfacing Mantis misjudgment or portfolio distress. Michael confirmed 2026-08-20 that a fund IS actively raising, so this gate is live.
- G5 no passed-deal content. He refused twice on one call, and refused again after Michael explicitly offered to anonymize the investors.
- G7 no personal criticism of named individuals. Disagree with the argument.
Hedging ban narrowed. The old card hard-banned “I think” as hedging. Jeffrey says it 47 times across 11.6% of his 344 recorded speaking turns. Stripping it made him sound more certain than he is, and he is deliberately precise about the line between what he knows and what nobody knows. Likely a direct cause of the “not hitting my mark” complaint. Now bans stacked qualifiers only, and explicitly permits “I don’t know”, “nobody knows”, “it’s too early to tell”, “the question becomes”.
“ecosystem” removed from the jargon ban. He uses it himself [2025-10-09, 2026-03-12]. That ban was the writer’s preference, not his.
Also fixed in the same pass
The emoji ban was silently dead on 9 of 25 rule cards fleet-wide. Two variants:
\u{...} (JS syntax needing a u flag that scanner.ts does not pass) and
\U0001F300 (Python-only, valid Python so offline lints passed it, inert in
JS). scanner.ts catches the compile error and does if (!regex) continue,
so a dead ban is indistinguishable from a rule that never matched. Canon:
megaphone-studio-platform/references/rule-card-regex-portability.md.
Scope note
Rule and voice cards are human-gated. The card was drafted, presented, and applied only after Michael’s explicit approval. No client-facing action was taken: nothing posted to Jeffrey, no Notion cards touched.