Question
Can an Engineering Lab make its current project activity easier to understand without adding a database, API, polling or client-side state?
Hypothesis
Yes. The content model already has a project status field. Rendering that field on project surfaces should provide a useful current-state signal while keeping the repository as the source of truth.
Change
Expose project status in the project archive and project detail view.
The site remains a static build:
repository content → Astro build → generated HTML
There is no runtime status service.
Boundary
This is intentionally documented status, not live health.
A project marked active means the archive currently records it as active. It does not mean its deployment, bot, API or worker is healthy at the exact moment a visitor loads the page.
That distinction avoids a false promise while still giving readers useful context.
Result
The experiment favors a small existing capability over a new system.
No database, API, authentication, analytics or background process is required.
Lesson
When a product already contains trustworthy metadata, the first question should be whether the interface actually exposes it before adding infrastructure to compute more state.