I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.
Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.
And thanks for the note about the images, I'll take that into account! I only really just started this project and am going to keep iterating as I learn to use the tools better and I find the right visual language for it.
Since you seem in the mood to give feedback ;) If you take a quick glance at the previous story, do you feel the same way about the images in that one or was it just this one's that you found particularly unpolished?
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.
Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.