Devlog
Building Second Chance
What was attempted, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be. Written for anyone building something similar.
-
OK at Every Step
A tool that returns the wrong shape instead of an error took a live email signup form down, and reported success while doing it. What went wrong, how it was found, and the guard that now catches it.
-
It Would Not Open
The Windows app exited on its own and then refused to open at all; three plausible fixes (Windows repair, pruning a 6 GB session-history folder, a GPU setting) all did nothing, and the real cause turned out to be the app restoring a saved in-app browser preview pointed at a local dev server.
-
Too Big to Remember
A week of compacting, restructuring and pruning an AI coding agent's memory, including the night the whole knowledge store was archived by accident and came back only because one session went looking for one note.
-
A Job Nobody Wants
A pub cleaning job built on top of a toilet minigame reached eight-of-eight phases and passed a live in-editor test measuring exactly the predicted numbers - and a pre-test adversarial audit had already found six critical defects that every automated check in the project called clean.
-
Twelve Hours on the Grass
A day spent making 98 hectares read as a parkland golf course. The grass layer took twelve hours, got fixed, and was then deleted on purpose - what actually sold the course was 274 trees, 2,180 shrubs, 212 gorse bushes, 79 molehills, a fence, and a flock of rooks that first appeared eight centimetres underground.
-
The Score Kept Improving
A police uniform's torso was rebuilt for a fortnight while an automated coverage score kept improving and the same holes kept appearing around the neck - because the gate filtered out the two regions being complained about.
-
Three Success Messages
A script tagged 186 placed props, read every one back, verified them, called save and wrote nothing at all - two independent faults, three success messages, and one file timestamp that finally told the truth.
-
Zero to Full Lock
A digital keypress was assigned straight to the steering axis, so the bike went from zero to full lock in one frame; here is the fix, a headlamp that came on three hours after dark for an unrelated reason, and an honest note that nobody has ridden any of it yet.