Today A Wine App stopped grading itself. Every number the recommendation engine had ever been judged on came from a fixture I wrote — a simulated drinker with an invented palate, indifferent to anything I hadn’t thought to give her. So I put ten real drinkers in front of it, their own ratings in their own order, judged on bottles they hadn’t opened yet. The engine was a coin flip. It handed someone who drinks Vega Sicilia a 119 kr Cava. The rest of the day was earning that number back: the profile became a single door instead of twenty fields saying the same thing in different shapes, two calibration engines came out entirely, and four measured changes moved it from 0.53 to 0.57 with a bottle she went on to love sitting at rank 1. Roughly +70k lines, and the honest part is how much of it was deletion.
Sodalis was the opposite kind of day — small, specific, all of it from things I’d complained about while using it. Buttons that didn’t visibly answer a tap. A confirmation you had to scroll twice to reach. A club emblem the server had been quietly refusing to overwrite since August. Six builds out to TestFlight.
Plus small passes on Havnetryk and The Cloudy Brain, and an idea got pruned.
Tonight the wine engine is finally measured against people who exist.