2026-03-23 | 🏛️ Launching Systems for Public Good
🤖 Today we launched a new automated blog series called Systems for Public Good — a daily AI-generated blog about democracy, public goods, collective well-being, and what it means to build a society that works for everyone.
🌱 Why This Series Exists
🏛️ American democracy has been under significant pressure in recent years, and decades of free market dogma have eroded the very idea that some things are worth building together.
🔓 The national conversation about freedom has narrowed to focus almost exclusively on negative freedom — freedom from government, regulation, and taxes — while ignoring positive freedom — the freedom to be healthy, educated, safe, and mobile.
🌊 This series aims to foster open, respectful discussion about democratic values, public investment, and an abundance mindset.
🔧 What We Built
📦 The implementation follows the same architecture as Auto Blog Zero and Chickie Loo, with one key difference: Google Search grounding.
🗂️ New Files
| 📄 File | 📝 Purpose |
|---|---|
scripts/lib/blog-series-config.ts | 🏛️ Added systems-for-public-good series configuration (icon, author, nav link, schedule) |
systems-for-public-good/AGENTS.md | 🧠 Series identity, voice, source quality guidelines, editorial approach |
systems-for-public-good/2026-03-23-the-forgotten-commons.md | 🌱 Seed blog post introducing the series themes |
.github/workflows/systems-for-public-good.yml | ⚙️ Daily workflow at 9 AM PT using gemini-2.5-flash |
specs/systems-for-public-good.md | 📋 Product and engineering spec |
🧹 YAML Hygiene: Extracting Inline Programs
🔧 While building this series, we also tackled a significant code quality issue: inline programs embedded in YAML workflow files.
⚠️ Across all 7 workflow files, we found 17 distinct inline programs — TypeScript embedded in YAML via npx tsx -e, complex multi-line bash scripts, and even Node.js one-liners inside bash.
✅ We extracted all of them into dedicated, testable scripts:
| 📜 Script | 🔄 Replaces |
|---|---|
scripts/pull-vault-posts.ts | 🗑️ Inline TypeScript in 3 blog series workflows (already existed, now used) |
scripts/sync-series-to-vault.ts | 🗑️ Complex bash + inline Node.js in 3 blog series workflows |
scripts/pull-obsidian-vault.ts | 🗑️ Inline TypeScript in internal-linking workflow |
scripts/push-obsidian-vault.ts | 🗑️ Inline TypeScript in internal-linking workflow |
scripts/run-social-post.sh | 🗑️ Conditional bash routing in tweet-reflection workflow |
🎯 The result: every workflow YAML file is now purely declarative — each run: step is a single script call with arguments, never an inline program.
🧪 Test Results
| 📊 Metric | 🔢 Value |
|---|---|
| 🧪 Blog series tests | 55 pass |
| 🧪 Sync-series-to-vault tests | 7 pass (new) |
| 🧪 Full suite | 795 pass, 1 pre-existing failure |
🧠 Model Selection: gemini-2.5-flash
🔍 The most important technical decision was choosing the right Gemini model.
⚠️ The default blog model (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview) does not reliably support Google Search grounding — it returns errors when the googleSearch tool is requested.
✅ After researching free-tier Gemini models, we selected gemini-2.5-flash because:
- 🔍 It reliably supports Google Search grounding on the free tier
- 💰 It has sufficient free quota for daily blog generation
- 🧠 It provides more capable reasoning for complex political and economic analysis
- 📅 It has no near-term retirement date (unlike gemini-2.0-flash, retiring June 2026)
📰 Source Quality as a First-Class Concern
🛡️ The AGENTS.md establishes strict source quality guidelines:
- ✅ High-quality sources: NPR, PBS, AP, Reuters, BBC, academic journals, government data
- 🚫 Avoided sources: ideologically driven think tanks and partisan media that prioritize engagement over accuracy
- 📊 Primary sources preferred over opinion pieces
🏛️ Core Themes
🔑 The series explores interconnected themes that are rarely discussed together:
- 🔓 Positive vs. negative freedom — and why America needs both
- 💰 Modern monetary theory — how sovereign currency actually works
- 🔄 Systems thinking — why simple solutions to complex problems backfire
- 🌊 Abundance mindset — expanding prosperity rather than just redistributing scarcity
- 🏡 Real wealth — the tangible things that make life good, independent of monetary measures
- 🌍 International comparisons — learning from what works in other democracies
📐 Editorial Approach
⚖️ The editorial guidelines aim to maintain healthy, respectful discourse:
- 🏛️ Pro-democracy without being partisan
- 🤔 Steelmanning opposing views before responding
- 📊 Data and evidence over narrative and opinion
- 💬 Ending posts with questions answerable from multiple perspectives
📚 Book Recommendations
📖 Similar
- 🏛️ 💰📉➡️📈🗳️ The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy by Stephanie Kelton
- 🌊 🌐🔗🧠📖 Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
- 🔓 Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin
🔄 Contrasting
- 💰 Free to Choose by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman
- 🏛️ The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
- 📊 Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
🎨 Creatively Related
- 🌍 🍩🌍⚖️ Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth
- 🤝 The Commons by David Bollier
- 🧠 📖🏛️📉 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
🦋 Bluesky
2026-03-23 | 🏛️ Launching Systems for Public Good
AI Q: 🏛️ Which public service contributes most to your daily quality of life?
🏛️ Democratic Values | 🧠 Systems Thinking | 💰 Economic Theory | 🌊 Abundance Mindset
— Bryan Grounds (@bagrounds.bsky.social) 2026-04-01T07:38:29.000Z
https://bagrounds.org/ai-blog/2026-03-23-systems-for-public-good