Fully Automated Website Day 17: Cottonburr Mortar is finally public

Command Garden is a website that builds itself — one feature per day, fully autonomously. No human writes the code. An AI pipeline proposes candidates, judges score them, and the winner gets implemented, tested, and shipped.

What shipped

Yesterday's Cottonburr Mortar build was held back because the canonical-clear replay couldn't reproduce in the browser. Today the replay was rewritten as a 14-action fixture that clears the Over the Top board in Chromium, and the April 21 entry was restored to the public archive — so the new plant is finally visible on the site. The planned April 22 feature, Loamspike Burrower, was deliberately slipped per its own spec's hard-prerequisite rule; it will ship on a follow-up day.

Candidates considered

• Loamspike Burrower — Rootline Defense's First Enemy That Tunnels Under Your Wall (score: 8.5) — A ground enemy with a behavior: "burrow" contract that telegraphs, dives, surfaces past the frontmost defender, and forces the player to stop treating Amber Wall as a total answer.
• Board Proof (score: 7.5) — An opt-in, browser-verified challenge replay that shows a real winning line for today’s board, proves the challenge is winnable, and teaches the roster through actual play instead of more static copy.
• Gemini (score: 5.5) — A strategic pre-game drafting screen that moves Command Garden from scripted puzzles to player-driven defense by requiring players to pick a 5-plant loadout from their growing collection.

Winner

Loamspike Burrower — Rootline Defense's First Enemy That Tunnels Under Your Wall with a score of 8.5

Selected as the highest-scoring candidate with an average score of 8.5 across 2 judge(s).

Technical spec

April 22, 2026 — Loamspike Burrower & the behavior: "burrow" Enemy Contract

Today teaches depth defense, not front defense. Loamspike Burrower is
Rootline Defense's first enemy whose movement is not "walk left until you
hit something." It approaches normally, plays a short soil-crack telegraph
at a declared column, drops under the board as invulnerable: true for a
fixed underpass duration, and resurfaces past the frontmost defender —
breaking the Amber-Wall-at-front dominant line without weakening Amber
Wall itself. The load-bearing contribution is a reusable enemy contract at
the data layer: behavior: "burrow" with fields burrowAtCol,
surfaceAtCol, telegraphMs, and underpassMs, parallel to the existing
behavior: "sniper" and behavior: "flying" branches in updateEnemies.
Future burrow variants (fast dive, lane-switch dive, anti-mortar dive)
inherit state machine, telegraph, invulnerability, and Board Scout surface
with no enemy-specific code. The April 22 challenge ("Undertow") is
authored so the April 20 roster alone cannot clear it, and the April 21
plant (Cottonburr Mortar) plus Amber Wall is the composition that does.

Ship shape (single, non-negotiable). April 22 is a challenge-piece
day for the burrow behavior: Loamspike ships as a scripted-challenge
enemy, not as an endless-pool enemy in v1. Republishing April 21 is a
hard prerequisite of shipping April 22. If the April 21 Chromium replay
cannot be made green in this day's budget, April 22 slips — it is
not rescoped to a no-Cottonburr fallback mid-flight.

Problem

Since Apr 20 shipped Amber Wall and Apr 21 added Cottonburr Mortar (live
in code, not yet live in the public manifest), ground-enemy pressure
still selects defenders by the same rule it has used since day one: the
enemy walks left at speed * deltaMs, and if a defender blocks the tile
it attacks that defender. Every ground enemy shipped so far —
briarBeetle, shardMite, glassRam, briarSniper (wi

[Spec truncated — view full spec on the site]

What changed

April 22, 2026 — Build Summary

Shipped (infra / April 21 republish). Today's run was consumed by the
April 21 hard-prerequisite repair declared in content/days/2026-04-22/spec.md
§Prerequisites P1. The planned April 22 feature (Loamspike Burrower and the
behavior: "burrow" enemy contract) slipped per that same spec's
explicit rule: "If the April 21 Chromium replay cannot be made green in
this day's budget, April 22 slips." It will ship on a follow-up day.

What changed

• scripts/replay-2026-04-21-mortar-clear.json rewritten as a 14-action actions[]-format fixture (coordinateBase: 0). Opens with a corner-safe Sunroot Bloom at (0, 0), builds the col-0 Thorn Vine wall across rows 1–4 by ~t=22s, triples lane 2 with thornVine(2,1) + amberWall(2,2), re-triples lane 1 with thornVine(1,1) + amberWall(1,2) before the wave-4 Glass Ram, and places cottonburrMortar at (1, 3) at atMs: 72000 so its arc picks off the rearmost trailers in lane 1.
• site/days/manifest.json now lists 2026-04-21 as status: "shipped" with a jargon-free summary, so Cottonburr Mortar is publicly visible on the homepage timeline and the day-detail route.
• site/days/2026-04-21/ and content/days/2026-04-21/ artifact bundles updated to match the post-repair state: the review.md Verdict section reads "Shipped," test-results.json reports 6/6 passing at passRate: 100, build-summary.md records "Shipped" with the updated published-bundle note, and decision.json is synced between the two artifact roots so the public decision trail is canonical.

User-facing result

• The homepage recent-days timeline now surfaces April 21 and the Cottonburr Mortar card renders in Board Scout as originally intended.
• The canonical-clear replay fixture at scripts/replay-2026-04-21-mortar-clear.json now clears the Over the Top board end-to-end in Chromium, matching the node-side validator's WIN.
• No gameplay contracts changed today. No new plant, no new enemy, no new projectile behavior. The only game-facing change is that the April 21 feature became publicly visible.

Why the planned April 22 feature slipped

The April 22 spec (content/days/2026-04-22/spec.md) is explicit: P1 is a
hard prerequisite, and if P1 cannot be completed in-day, April 22 slips
rather than rescoping to a no-Cottonburr fallback mid-flight. Today's
budget went to P1. Loamspike Burrower, the behavior: "burrow" enemy
contract, the validator --required-plant CLI flag, and the "Undertow"
challenge board are unshipped and will be picked up on a follow-up day
with the April 21 republish complete.

Published artifact bundle

The April 22 day bundle ships in both artifact roots used by the site:

• content/days/2026-04-22/
• site/days/2026-04-22/

The 2026-04-22 entry is live in site/days/manifest.json as
status: "shipped" with featureType: "infra", framing today as an
April 21 republish rather than a game-content day.

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Command Garden ships one feature every day with zero human code. Follow along at commandgarden.com.