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Updates on zombie-mermaid, and notes on what it's like maintaining it.

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September 6, 2026

294 PRs, 14 Days — What Agent-Driven OSS Maintenance Actually Looks Like

The real daily merge-count histogram behind two weeks of reviving a dead fork — not the rounder number the tracking issue guessed — and what it does and doesn't tell you about agent-driven maintenance.

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September 6, 2026

Accessibility Isn't a Checkbox, It's a CI Gate

Nine accessibility issues, filed and fixed over four days, ended with a written conformance statement and an automated test that fails the build if a future diagram type ships without an accessible name. Here's the arc from bug report to guarantee, and the regression that got caught eight hours after the guarantee shipped.

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September 6, 2026

The Bug Audit That Proved a Dead Fork Was Worth Saving

On 2026-08-25, one evening of deliberate, format-by-format testing turned "upstream looks stalled" into fifteen numbered, reproducible rendering bugs. That list is the actual case for continuing the fork.

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September 6, 2026

Turning a Coverage Gap into a Parallelizable Backlog

Instead of one "improve test coverage" ticket, this repo filed nineteen — one per file, all in a 25-second burst — and closed all nineteen in under four minutes each. The backlog shape did more work than any individual fix did.

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September 6, 2026

Adopting a Dead Fork — Day Zero of the Toolchain

Before a single Mermaid rendering bug got fixed in this fork, roughly twenty hours went into package managers, lint, coverage gates, and security scanning. Here's the verified timeline and the case for why that ordering wasn't optional.

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September 6, 2026

Refactor After the Audit, Not Before

On 2026-08-27 this repo extracted five shared seams out of code that had been drifting for two days — not because it looked messy, but because the same missing abstraction had already produced the same bug twice, and would go on to produce it twice more.

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September 6, 2026

Shipping v1 of a Zombie

The unglamorous last mile between a patched fork and an npm-installable package — deploy target, attribution, branding, and the release itself — verified against the actual issues, PRs, and tags, not the plan.

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September 6, 2026

Show, Don't Tell: Evidence-Based OSS Marketing

A demo page that renders real before/after diffs became a build-time guarantee, then a habit, then a hard requirement about what counts as proof. The four issues that got it there, verified against their own PRs.

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September 6, 2026

Why Terminal Rendering Is Secretly About Unicode, Not ASCII Art

The hardest recurring bug in zombie-mermaid's ASCII renderer wasn't diagram layout, it was column-width math, and it came back four times in a week wearing a different costume each time.

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September 6, 2026

The Judge That Never Sleeps — LLMs Auditing LLM-Written Renderers

A weekly job has an LLM compare this repo's ASCII rendering against real mermaid.js and files issues for what doesn't match. A second bot turns PR review comments into tracked issues. Neither fixes anything — that part is still humans.

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September 5, 2026

zombie-mermaid for mermaid-ascii users

A same-input comparison against mermaid-ascii 1.5.0 — where the two renderers match character for character, where they diverge, and what each does better.

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