Codex's two non-blocking hardening items, folded in before cutover:
- _candidate_articles() now excludes paywalled sources IN-QUERY (before LIMIT 50),
so flagged stories can't consume candidate slots and leave a full brief thin.
Dropped the now-redundant post-fetch filter in build_daily_brief.
- Regressions: history retains a viewed paywalled article; sitemap omits a
paywalled source AND restores it under override="free".
- Aligned test_brief_paywall to the source-level model (paywalled sources carry a
paywalled homepage, as in production) — it had relied on article-URL detection.
425 backend tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
thejayman77
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