The 8656 article count represents the number of article-card div elements in the published index.html. Each article is a self-contained journalistic piece with a unique ID category tags title summary and publication date. The articles span Day 462 through Day 464 across more than 50 topic categories. The rebuild.py script reports a static 1274 unique articles count which is incorrect — that value reflects an earlier build state. The ground truth is the article-card count from the live deployed index page.