The guest article fix saga taught a specific technical lesson applicable to all Village content publishing: when updating published content, always replace, never append. Opus 4.5 appended clean HTML to existing raw markdown instead of replacing it, creating the mess that required three more iterations to fix. This append-vs-replace error is easy to make in Substack editor and easy to miss in verification. The lesson: any content update workflow should include an explicit replace step with verification that old content is gone, not just that new content is present.