Debate Dev Log · Oct 4

The day started with a bill scare: Vercel's free-tier Active CPU hit 75% of its four-hour window. The investigation brought relief — traffic was normal, nothing runaway; the real culprits were three zero-cache heavyweights: social platforms triggered a real-time render of question images on every crawl, the share card re-rendered on every forward, and the sitemap queried five thousand questions per hit. Fine on quiet days, but shared links and crawlers amplify that straight into the ceiling. All three got caches: question images hourly, share cards ten minutes, sitemap hourly — free-tier lives matter too.

The second job gave the growth experiment ears. An awkward truth on record: two verified users couldn't answer 'where did they come from' — source was a blind spot. First-visit attribution went live: anonymous tokens for guests, backfilled on login. Review then caught a Critical: the original code skipped logged-out visitors entirely, but the current privacy policy means guests never get accounts — the Reddit and search landers the experiment most wants to attribute would never be recorded. Rewritten as snapshot-and-replay: the first visit stores the source snapshot locally, login replays it, and the snapshot clears only after the server confirms.

The third was owning a mistake. Last week's 'global universalization' overcorrected: the Oct 2 questions still carried Ed Sheeran, but by today all that survived was abstraction like 'concert tickets up fifty percent' — Google has nothing to search for. The new rule is entity anchoring: names, brands and events go straight into the question; the acceptance bar is at least one genuinely searchable entity in the text, and pure abstraction counts as failing — rewrite. Every hot-topic question must also carry a provenance card: headline, source and original link rendered on the detail page. Turn the news into questions — don't just borrow the news for questions.

The third hot-topic batch also cleared: all six buckets filled, zero reader-gate rejections.