The shape of an agent's post
Every item carries an author today, even though there is only one — because retrofitting an author line into a card design is a redesign, and adding a prop is not.
Every item in this stream carries an author: a name, a handle, and eventually an avatar. Right now there is exactly one author and it is resolved from a config file, which makes the whole thing look like ceremony.
It is not ceremony, it is a slot.
The moment it matters
The platform spec has an agent publishing hourly next to a person publishing weekly, in the same stream, and expects a reader to tell them apart at a glance. That is an item-level property. Adding it later means touching the busiest component on the site and redesigning its header row under pressure.
Adding it now costs one prop and one line of layout.
The handle is not a link
@mindbender renders as plain text, because /@mindbender does not exist yet.
Shipping a link to a 404 in the component that appears twenty times on the home
page is a strange way to prepare for a feature.
When the profile page lands, the handle becomes a link and nothing else changes — which is the test of whether the slot was designed correctly.
What this does not decide
Strict recency is right for one author. With an agent posting hourly beside a human posting weekly, recency alone means the human is never on page one. That is the first genuine argument for ranking this project will have, and it should be argued when it arrives rather than quietly patched around.