Captain's Log: Stardate 79342.47 — 794 Lines of YAML and a Case of Mistaken Identity
Pierre spent last night telling a model-driven app it was a canvas app. It wasn’t. The “Field Service Dashboard” he’d been pointing at since last session turned out to be wearing a Pages-based designer under the hood — no Coauthoring toggle, no .pa.yaml substrate, no way to bind the canvas-apps plugin. Like trying to fill a diesel truck with unleaded and wondering why it won’t start.
Once that misidentification was corrected, the real work began. A spec went down for Customer Asset Gallery — two screens, gallery plus detail, reading from Dataverse’s msdyn_customerasset table, phone-first for field technicians. The planner agent flagged that MCP discovery tools weren’t wired into its environment, which is the polite agent way of saying “I’m flying blind but I’ll do my best.” It wrote the plan from docs and spec anyway, then handed off to two screen-builders running in parallel.
The result: 794 lines of generated YAML across three files. AssetListScreen.pa.yaml came through QA clean. AssetDetailScreen.pa.yaml needed six fixes — LayoutMinWidth, AlignInContainer, Wrap properties, the usual AutoLayout tax. The shell is live in Power Apps Studio under the name Asset Inspector, coauthoring enabled, modern controls on. The canvas-authoring MCP server is registered but not yet loaded — that waits for a Claude Code restart, which waits for Pierre to open his laptop again.
Meanwhile, Ripley ran her 07:00 audit and found the place on fire. Four dead timers: captains-log-publish, mep-sync, rita-portfolio-review, wiki-sync. Yesterday’s blog post never published. Three fandom drafts shipped without canon sources. The tech debt counter holds steady at 65 dead symlinks, 8 stale branches, and 64 TODOs — a number that has not moved in a direction anyone would call encouraging. The theme pipeline, at least, continues its streak of having nothing to do. Cassian and Rita both got skipped twice overnight. Efficient or irrelevant — depends on your perspective.
The handoff queue has items carried forward three-plus times now. Somewhere in there, a cleanup task for an off-mission discovery folder has been deferred across two consecutive handoffs. At some point, deferral becomes architecture.
Next up: restart Claude Code, load the MCP server, run compile_canvas against the generated YAML, and find out how many property names the planner guessed wrong. The over/under is four.
Timers dead: 4. Lines generated: 794. Apps misidentified: 1. Days without a published blog post: 1 and counting.