Twenty-Three Bugs

One week.

Han Luyi shut down every job-taking platform, set his phone to silent, stuffed the fridge with frozen dumplings and canned coffee, and spent the entire week doing one thing.

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. That night, he got stuck. No matter how he adjusted the pattern-matching logic, it was wrong. After staring at the screen for two hours, his mind only turned slower and slower. He went downstairs and walked around the complex. The cold wind cleared his head: he had chosen the wrong granularity for feature extraction. He went back upstairs, revised the plan, and got it working. The following days flowed by—interfaces, integration, testing. Since Sight had upgraded, his health had improved greatly. 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 several hundred Bug patterns he had accumulated through Sight: what each Bug looked like, what conditions triggered it, how severe its impact was, and the optimal way to fix it. Other people trained AI on code itself. He trained AI on precise real-world data from code.

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 AI startups—the barrier that discouraged ninety percent of independent developers—now stood before him.

Fortunately, he had one advantage others did not: exceptionally high-quality data. Other people needed a hundred thousand dirty data points to train a basically usable model. With three thousand clean data points labeled through Sight, he could produce one. Less data meant fewer training rounds and proportionately less computing power.

He chose a compromise: an open-source lightweight model as the foundation, spot instances for formal training, and resumable uploads to prevent interruptions. In the end, it cost just 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 more it would cost afterward.

First, he had to get the prototype running.

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, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the screen.

All of a sudden, he was a little afraid to run the tests.

The feeling was all too familiar. Finishing an exam but not daring to check the answers. Finishing a paper but not daring to run a plagiarism check. Finishing code but not daring to compile it. Sending a confession on WeChat but not daring to look at the reply. The more something mattered, the less he dared verify it.

He got up, went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He took one sip, poured the rest out, then came back and sat down.

He fed 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 were highlighted in red on the screen. Twelve hours a day on average, Sight assisting him, his body in peak 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 Bugs than Sight. He pulled up both results and compared them. Most overlapped.

In one week, one person had created something that, on his own code, was already close to the level of his cheat ability.

Han Luyi used Sight to confirm the repair paths, then spent two hours eliminating 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 while.

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

Five minutes later, Su Niannian exploded.

"I tried it!!! I threw in a section of code from our team last week and scanned it. It found eight problems!! Three of them were ones we already knew about, but the other five were things we had no idea about!! And its impact assessments are incredibly intuitive—'This Bug has an approximately 15% chance of triggering service degradation under high-concurrency scenarios.' Operations and product people can understand it too!! It isn't 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 'find the Bug,' but you jumped straight to 'find the Bug + tell you the consequences + teach you how to fix it'! This isn't optimization! This is a dimensionality reduction strike! It's a dual-vector foil!"

"I'll handle the user testing," Su Niannian sent at last. "I'll get 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 on her last message: "Flash will most likely go through bankruptcy restructuring." They had not contacted each other since.

After thinking for a moment, Han Luyi typed: "Lawyer Gu, are you available to set aside some time? I have a new legal consultation."

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

After a while, Gu Siyue replied: "What area?"

"Software copyright registration, possibly trademarks as well."

"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. An instant reply at eleven at night, and she was still scheduling clients on Saturday. Did this woman never get off work?

Han Luyi replied, "Okay."

After a pause, he added, "This time it's not a report. I wrote some software myself."

A few seconds later, Gu Siyue replied: "Then we need to move even faster. See you tomorrow."

At two o'clock the next afternoon, Boheng Law Firm.

The law firm was quieter on Saturday than it had been during his previous visit. Most of the offices along the hallway were dark. The receptionist led him to a conference room. As they passed an office whose door was not fully closed, he saw three cups of coffee on the desk inside—two empty, the third half-finished. A pothos sat in the corner of the windowsill, its leaves drooping, its soil dry and pale. Two spare shirts, one black and one white, hung on the coat rack.

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

Did this woman live in her office?

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

"Talk."

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 offered no assessment after listening. She went straight into legal questioning.

"Has the software copyright been registered?"

"No."

"Did you use any IP from your former employer in the code?"

"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 start the copyright process today. We'll conduct the trademark search at the same time. If there are no conflicts, we'll submit it within a week." After filling one page, she turned to the next. "What platform is your code repository on?"

"GitHub. Private repository."

"Good. Organize the source code documentation and a description of the software's functions, then email them to me. The sooner, the better."

Han Luyi nodded.

Gu Siyue continued with the process, then suddenly paused.

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

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

Gu Siyue's pen stopped.

She looked up. The look in her eyes changed, shifting from "processing paperwork" to "scrutiny."

"Do you have the agreement?"

"At home."

"Photograph it and send it to me."

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

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

The office fell silent for two seconds.

Han Luyi said nothing. His mind quickly went through that resignation agreement. He had skimmed it when he signed. There had indeed been a non-compete clause, but he had not examined it closely. 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 conference room and headed for the elevator. He passed that office with the partly open door again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the drooping pothos in the corner.

His steps faltered, but he did not stop.

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

They won't really activate it, will they?

He put his phone back in his pocket and quickened his pace.