Two names had to go
Two identifiers had crept into this blog that I didn't want public. One was tied to my account. The other was a word I used both as a deployment team name and as a quant bot name. I decided to remove both from content and docs.
My first assumption was that this was a text edit. Find the name in a post, reword it, replace the team name in the docs with a placeholder like <team>, and done.
Here's a question for your own project: when you search for a word that must not go public, do you search only the body text, or also filenames, paths, and build output?
The name was in a filename, not a sentence
One quant post had the slug <identifier>-llm-early-close-gate. I had prefixed it with the bot's name. On this blog the slug is the filename, and the filename is the URL path. No amount of body editing would take the name out of the address bar.
The slug also lived in more than one place:
- the ko and en post filenames under
content/posts/ - the per-language OG images generated from the slug (
public/og/ko-post-….png,public/og/en-post-….png) - a list of representative slugs per category in the design doc (
DESIGN.md)
The team name was similar. It wasn't in any post. It was in the "domain/deploy" line of DESIGN.md and of the agent handoff doc (CODEX_HANDOFF.md). If I had only looked at what readers read, I would have missed it.
What would you do here: fix the body and move on, or change the slug too?
What I actually did
One commit:
- Renamed the slug to
llm-bot-early-close-gate: renamed the ko and en post files and changed one line in each. - Generated two new OG images (ko and en) for the new slug.
- Masked the team name and the slug list entry in
DESIGN.md, and the team name inCODEX_HANDOFF.md, as<team>. - In the same commit, added
.env*to.gitignore.
The whole change was 7 files, 6 insertions, 5 deletions. Editing took almost no time. Finding where the names lived is what took time.
Finally I searched for both identifiers in the content and in the build output and confirmed neither appeared. I checked the build output because when a name spreads into paths and generated files, as a slug does, searching the source sentences won't catch it. And what gets deployed is the build output, not the source.
Self-check
- Have you searched for the word you're hiding in filenames, URL slugs, and generated image filenames, not just body text?
- Is the same name written in files readers never see, like agent handoff notes or design docs?
- After fixing the source, did you search the actual build output that gets deployed and confirm zero hits?
The honest part
This commit only cleaned the current tree and the build output. The old slug and team name are still in git history; the commit didn't rewrite history. It also didn't add a redirect from the old slug URL to the new one. From this record alone I can't tell whether the old URL was ever deployed or indexed. And "zero hits" only means the two words I knew about were gone. If there's a third identifier I haven't noticed, this search wouldn't have found it.