Twenty-Three Bugs

One week.

Han Luyi shut down every job platform, put his phone on silent, stocked his fridge with frozen dumplings and canned coffee, and did only one thing for an entire week.

The first two days went smoothly. Frameworks and databases were his comfort zone; he could build them with his eyes closed. On the third day, he started grinding through the core engine. He got stuck that night. No matter how he adjusted the pattern-matching logic, something was off. After staring at the screen for two hours, his thoughts only slowed further. He went downstairs and walked around the residential complex. The cold wind cleared his head: the granularity of the feature extraction was wrong. He went back, revised the approach, and it worked. The following days went downhill in the best way possible—interfaces, integration, testing. Since upgrading Sight, his physical condition had improved considerably. Back at Dingsheng, three straight days of high-intensity coding would have wrecked him. Now, it did not.

The core of the core was the Bug pattern database. Han Luyi structured all the hundreds of Bug patterns he had accumulated through Sight: what each Bug looked like, what conditions triggered it, how serious its impact was, and the optimal way to fix it. Other people trained AI on code itself. He trained AI on precise data from code in the real world.

Training was the most expensive part.

Han Luyi checked prices across cloud platforms. By his calculations, training alone would cost tens of thousands. He stared at the quote page for half a minute. The first barrier to starting an AI business—the one that discouraged ninety percent of independent developers—now stood before him.

Fortunately, he had an advantage no one else did: exceptionally high-quality data. Others needed a hundred thousand dirty data points to train a barely usable model. He could feed it three thousand clean entries labeled through Sight and get results. Less data meant fewer training rounds, and computing power costs dropped proportionally.

He chose a compromise: an open-source lightweight model as the foundation, spot instances for the actual training, and checkpoint recovery to prevent interruptions. In the end, it cost a little over forty thousand.

Five years of savings plus his severance package meant forty thousand would not break him.

But forty thousand was only one round of training. He did not dare calculate how much the rest would cost.

He would get the prototype running first.

On the evening of the seventh day, the code was finished.

The cursor rested after the semicolon on the final line. Han Luyi took his hands off the keyboard, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the screen.

Suddenly, he was a little afraid to run the test.

He knew this feeling too well. Finishing an exam and not daring to check the answers. Finishing a paper and not daring to run a plagiarism check. Finishing code and not daring to compile it. Not daring to check WeChat after confessing. The more something mattered, the less he dared verify it.

He stood, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, took a sip, then poured it out. He returned and sat down.

He threw BugKiller's source code into BugKiller, using the knife he had made to cut the food he had cooked.

Run.

The progress bar began moving: 12%... 31%...

He realized he was holding his breath.

47%... 68%... 89%...

The progress bar finished.

Twenty-three Bugs.

Twenty-three lines of red highlights filled the screen. Twelve hours a day on average, assisted by Sight, in peak physical condition.

Twenty-three.

He stared at that patch of red for a few seconds, then activated Sight and scanned the same code.

Twenty-five.

BugKiller had found two fewer than Sight. He pulled the two results together and compared them. Most overlapped.

One week. One person. What he had built had already come close to the level of his own cheat ability on his own code.

Han Luyi used Sight to confirm the repair paths, then spent two hours wiping out every Bug.

Then he had BugKiller scan it again.

A line of green text popped up on the screen.

0 Issues Found.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at that zero for a long time.

He packaged the prototype and sent it to Su Niannian. "One week. I didn't break my word."

Five minutes later, Su Niannian exploded.

"I tried it!!! I threw in a chunk of code from our team last week and scanned it. It found eight issues!! Three of them were ones we already knew about, but the other five were ones we didn't know about!! And its impact assessment was incredibly intuitive: 'This Bug has an approximately 15% chance of causing service degradation under high-concurrency conditions.' Even operations and product teams can understand it!! It's not just for developers!!!"

"Calm down."

"I can't calm down! There isn't a single tool on the market that can reach the level of 'impact assessment'! Every competitor stops at 'finding Bugs,' but you skipped straight to 'find the Bug + tell you the consequences + teach you how to fix it'! This isn't an optimization! This is a dimensionality reduction strike! It's a two-dimensional foil!"

"I'll handle user testing." Su Niannian sent one last message. "I'll find a few developer friends to try it and collect feedback. You keep iterating."

"Okay."

Han Luyi put down his phone, opened his WeChat contacts, and found Gu Siyue.

Their chat history was still sitting at the point where she had said, "Flash will most likely go into bankruptcy restructuring." They had not contacted each other since.

After thinking for a moment, Han Luyi typed: "Lawyer Gu, would it be convenient to set a time? I have a new legal consultation."

It was already past eleven at night. He did not expect a reply tonight.

A while later, Gu Siyue replied: "What area?"

"Software copyright registration. It may also involve trademarks."

"Come to my office at two tomorrow afternoon. New cases are charged at the standard consultation rate."

Tomorrow was Saturday. Han Luyi looked at the message. She had replied instantly after eleven at night and was meeting clients on Saturday. Did this woman ever get off work?

Han Luyi replied, "Okay."

After a pause, he added, "This time it isn't a report. I wrote software myself."

Gu Siyue took a few seconds before replying: "Then we need to move even faster. See you tomorrow."

At two the next afternoon, Boheng Law Firm.

The law firm was quieter on Saturday than the last time he had come. Most of the offices along the hallway were dark. The receptionist led him to a meeting room. As they passed down the corridor, they went by an office whose door was not fully shut. Three cups of coffee sat on the desk inside—two empty, the third half-finished. A pothos plant sat in the corner of the windowsill, its leaves drooping, its soil dry and pale. Two spare shirts, one black and one white, hung from a coat rack.

The plaque on the door read: "Gu Siyue, Senior Partner."

Does she live in her office?

Gu Siyue was already waiting in the meeting room, her laptop open on the table.

"Go on."

Han Luyi spent three minutes introducing BugKiller: what it did, how it worked, where its data came from, and what stage it had reached.

Gu Siyue gave no evaluation after listening. She went straight into legal questioning.

"Have you registered the software copyright?"

"No."

"Does the code use any IP from your former employer?"

"No."

"Have you checked the trademark?"

"No."

Three consecutive "no"s made Gu Siyue's pen pause. She looked up at him.

"So you haven't done anything."

"That's why I came to you."

Gu Siyue did not respond. She lowered her head and quickly wrote several lines in her notebook.

"I'll have my assistant begin the copyright process today. We'll check for trademark conflicts at the same time. If there are no clashes, we'll submit within a week." After filling one page, she turned it over. "What platform is your code repository on?"

"GitHub. Private repository."

"Good. Organize the source code documents and software function description, then send them to my email. The sooner, the better."

Han Luyi nodded.

Gu Siyue continued through the process, then suddenly paused.

"Did you have a non-compete agreement with your former company?"

Han Luyi froze for a second. "I did, but when I signed the resignation agreement, HR said it was standard procedure and wouldn't actually be activated."

Gu Siyue's pen stopped.

She looked up, and her gaze at Han Luyi changed, switching from procedural to scrutinizing.

"Do you have the agreement?"

"At home."

"Take pictures and send it to me."

"There shouldn't be a problem, right? HR said—"

"What HR says doesn't count." Gu Siyue cut him off. Her tone did not grow harsher, but she enunciated every word clearly. "Only what is written in black and white counts. Your product is called an 'AI code review tool.' Your former employer is a technology company. If the non-compete clause contains words like 'artificial intelligence' or 'software development tools,' then everything you're doing now could be crossing the line."

The office went quiet for two seconds.

Han Luyi did not reply. His mind quickly ran through the resignation agreement. He had skimmed it when signing. There really had been a non-compete clause. He had not examined it closely at the time. HR had said it would not be activated, and he had believed them.

"I'll photograph it and send it to you when I get back," he said.

Gu Siyue gave a quiet "Mm" and lowered her head to continue writing.

Han Luyi left the meeting room and headed for the elevator. He passed that office with the half-open door again, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the drooping pothos in the corner.

His steps paused, but he did not stop.

After leaving the building, he pulled out his phone and looked at his notes again.

They wouldn't really activate it, would they?

He slipped his phone back into his pocket and quickened his pace.