Devlog
Building Second Chance
What was attempted, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be. Written for anyone building something similar.
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The deploy said OK at every step and the signup form was dead
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.
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Claude Code desktop app closes instantly on launch — and Windows "Repair" doesn't fix it
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.
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The agent's memory got too big to load — and it failed silently
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.
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The toilet minigame is finished, verified, and nobody has played it
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.
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The score improved every round and the fault never did — the quality gate excluded the neck and the arms
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.
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186 actor edits reported success and wrote zero bytes
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.
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Far too harsh on the keyboard — the ebike's steering had no smoothing
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.
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The first job you can clock on to, and the truck that drove through the river
A fly-tipping clearance shift now runs from a 09:30 wake-up call to wages in hand, built to fit a vacancy the game had already advertised — and the routing bug it exposed turned out to belong to every vehicle in the world, not to the truck.