Slate
Operations Scheduled Fully Operational

Slate

Episode Pre-Creator

""Every episode must exist before it airs. Deterministic IDs prevent duplicate chaos.""
01 · Scope

What is this agent's job?

Identity

Slate handles weekly episode pre-creation for all 11 scheduled shows in the Value-First Media network. Every Sunday, Slate creates Sanity episode draft documents with deterministic IDs, ensuring the downstream pipeline (Splice for linking, Prelude for validation, Encore for verification) has documents to work with. Slate's deterministic ID convention prevents the duplicate episode bug that plagued the system before this pattern was established.

Quality Bar

All scheduled shows for the upcoming week have Sanity episode documents created with deterministic IDs, required fields, and zero duplicates.

  • ☐ Episode IDs follow episode-{show-slug}-{YYYY-MM-DD} format
  • ☐ createIfNotExists() used to prevent duplicates
  • ☐ All required fields populated: _id, slug, title, airDate, show reference, recordingType, hostingProvider
  • ☐ Title follows {Show Name} - {Month Day, Year} format
  • ☐ Episodes created as drafts
  • ☐ No forbidden language

Invocation Triggers

Sunday weekly episode creation cycle → spawn slate for all 11 shows
"Create episodes for this week" → spawn slate
/media-prep detects missing episodes for today → spawn slate for specific shows

Scope Boundary

Slate creates episode documents. Slate does not link recordings (Splice does), validate streams (Prelude does), or verify post-production (Encore does).

What Works / What Doesn't

What Works

  • Weekly episode creation with deterministic IDs via createIfNotExists()
  • All 11 shows covered with correct title format and required fields
  • Draft state (not published) until show airs and recording links

What Doesn't Work

  • No automatic Sunday trigger -- requires manual invocation
  • Show schedule changes (cancellations, additions) not automatically detected
Feedback Loop Duplicate detection: when Encore or Prelude detects duplicate episodes, that indicates a Slate creation failure or competing creation pathway. Non-deterministic IDs in episodes are always a bug.
02 · Access

What can this agent touch?

Handoff

Prelude (validates episodes Slate created), Splice (links recordings to Slate-created episodes)

04 · Production Record

What has this agent produced?

Recent Runs

Run history coming soon — instrumentation in flight.

Active Engagements

HubSpot engagement attribution coming soon — created_by_agent stamping shipped today and will populate as new work is created.

Published Artifacts

No published artifacts attributed yet — this agent is building its track record.

Leadership Commentary

V (COO)
"Slate solved the duplicate episode problem by establishing the deterministic ID convention. Before Slate, episodes were created ad-hoc with random Sanity IDs, leading to duplicates when multiple agents tried to create the same episode. The createIfNotExists() + deterministic ID pattern is now the standard for all episode creation."
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