Changelog - 2026-03-23_04

Enforce Correct Citation Spacing with Mechanical Agent

New pipeline agent that mechanically enforces correct markdown citation spacing — no LLM, pure regex. Fixes the recurring problem of clumped, duplicated, and improperly spaced citations that affect Obsidian rendering, HTML/PDF exports, and readability.

Why

Citation spacing issues have been a recurring problem across multiple pipeline iterations. LLM agents produce citations with inconsistent spacing — claim.[^1] instead of claim. [^1], [^3][^3] instead of [^3], [^1][^2] instead of [^1] [^2]. These issues affect:

• Obsidian rendering: Obsidian's footnote parser is sensitive to spacing

• HTML/PDF exports: Pandoc interprets spacing inconsistencies differently

• Readability: Clumped citations are hard to distinguish

The rules are well-documented in context-v/reminders/Extended-Markdown-Citation-System-Syntax.md and context-v/reminders/Citation-Reminders.md but were never enforced mechanically. Every time we fix spacing in one agent, another agent reintroduces it. A dedicated mechanical agent that runs after assembly is the correct solution.

What Changed

New Agent: citation_spacing.py

Purely mechanical (no LLM). Runs after toc and before validate_citations in the pipeline. Enforces five rules via regex:

# Core function signature
def fix_citation_spacing(content: str) -> str:
    """Fix all citation spacing issues in markdown content."""

The agent processes both the final draft (7-*.md) and individual section files (2-sections/*.md) for consistency.

Pipeline position:

... → assemble_citations → toc → fix_citation_spacing → validate_citations → ...

Verification

Tested on Metabologic v0.2.4 final draft: found and fixed 12 spacing issues, primarily duplicate consecutive citations ([^3] [^3] → [^3]) and missing spaces before citations after punctuation (Ozempic.[^3] → Ozempic. [^3]).

Files Changed