The commits, in order: a linker. An aggressive linker. A larger catalog. A governor.
Four steps. Each one was a fix for the step before. The last one made the first one safe.
The linker alone
The linker reads a post and inserts inline anchors to other posts. Run it shy and it finds nothing. Run it bold and it finds too much. Either way, on its own, it is pointed at a list it does not own. The list is whatever happens to be in the file. Drafts. Ghosts. Stale summaries. The linker reads them all with equal trust.
A linker without a curated catalog is a confident stranger giving directions to a city he has not visited.
The aggressive linker alone
Turn the dial up. Now the linker finds connections you did not see. It also finds connections that are not there. It retrofits across twenty-three old posts in an afternoon. Most of the links are good. Some of them point at drafts that were cut. A few of them point at the right slug for the wrong reason — the phrase matched, the argument did not.
An aggressive linker without curation is noise injection in your own voice. The damage is small per link and compounding across the archive.
The curated catalog alone
So curate the list. Prune the ghosts. Write summaries that match the post the post actually became, not the post it was drafted as. The catalog is now load-bearing. It is the vocabulary the linker is permitted to speak.
And the linker, reading a clean list, still over-links. Because aggression is a setting, not a judgment. A clean vocabulary does not teach a fast mouth when to stop. Three links in a paragraph become five. Five become eight. The post starts to read like a wiki.
The governor
The governor caps link density. One link per paragraph, ceiling of N per post, no link within K words of another. It does not improve any single link. It restrains the count.
That is the whole trick. The catalog tells the linker what it is allowed to say. The governor tells the linker how often. The linker, between them, is free to be aggressive — because the two constraints catch it on both sides.
The loop
Each piece fails alone. The linker without the catalog invents. The catalog without the linker is documentation nobody reads. The aggressive setting without the governor floods the page. The governor without the aggression has nothing to restrain.
Together they are a feedback loop. The catalog narrows the vocabulary. The linker spends that vocabulary widely. The governor rations the spending. When a link is wrong, you fix it in the catalog. When the page feels noisy, you tighten the governor. When the linker misses a connection, you turn it up.
Three dials. One for what is allowed. One for how hard to look. One for how much to say.
None of them is the safety. The loop is.
Norbert Wiener wrote that the purpose of a control system is not to be right but to be correctable. The catalog, the linker, and the governor are not three good ideas. They are three places to turn a dial when the page comes out wrong.