Competitor

7:30 p.m.

Someone knocked on the door.

Lin Wanqing stood outside, holding a tray.

On it was a plate of little cakes. The cream had been spread evenly, with cocoa powder dusted into the shape of a leaf on top. Several strawberries were crammed together around the edges. Two words had been piped in cream: "Thank you."

Lin Duoduo peeked out from behind her mother. "Brother Luyi! Mom made them! I helped put on the strawberries!"

Han Luyi crouched down to look at her. "Did you arrange the strawberries yourself?"

"Mm! There were five at first, but I tasted two. They were sweet."

She said it with perfect confidence, as if reporting the results of a quality inspection.

Han Luyi picked up a piece.

"They're good. You arranged the strawberries especially well."

Lin Duoduo hugged her mother's leg and looked up. "Mom, Brother Luyi says they're good!"

Lin Wanqing patted Duoduo's head, the corners of her lips curving slightly.

"I've been wanting to thank you for what happened last time." Her voice was soft, and she barely lifted her gaze.

There was a faint shadow of exhaustion beneath her eyes.

Lin Wanqing did not stay long. She set the cakes on the shoe cabinet, took Duoduo by the hand, and left. Duoduo was still waving through the crack in the door. "Good night, Brother Luyi."

The door to 501 closed. He opened Sight.

Han Luyi took out his phone and opened his chat with Gu Siyue.

"A friend might need to fight a custody case. Do you have anyone who can take it?"

She replied instantly.

"Yes. One of our partners specializes in marriage and family law. What's the situation?"

Marriage and family law. He looked it up.

"I'll tell you the details once I've confirmed them. The other party isn't well-off. Can the fees be flexible?"

"Our firm has legal aid slots. If she qualifies, the fees can be reduced or waived. Tell her not to panic yet."

A few seconds later, Gu Siyue sent another message.

"Also, I went over your non-compete investigation list again. Out of more than a dozen people, only you were flagged red. That's not normal. There's another legal risk I'm verifying. Once I confirm it, I'll tell you in person."

Han Luyi stood at the door and finished that piece of cake.

Back at his computer, BugKiller v0.2 had only one final step left: one-click fixes.

The idea was not complicated. After detecting a Bug, it would feed the context to a large model to generate a patch, then use BugKiller itself to scan the patched code again and make sure no new issues had been introduced. Detection was its strength; generation could be handled by the large model. Each did what it did best.

The hard part was the final step. BugKiller had to determine whether a patch had "fixed in new Bugs," but the syntax of different frameworks varied wildly. React was different from Vue, and Python was completely different from Go. The pass rate was stuck at 93%. Su Niannian's required threshold was 95%.

Two points.

He spent another three hours rewriting the template-matching logic and tried four approaches. The fourth one passed.

The pass rate was 95.2%. It was ready to submit.

The final version of BugKiller v0.2 was packaged.

Two features had been added: Bug impact assessments now included confidence percentages, and fix suggestions supported one-click code patch generation. He sent it to Su Niannian.

The moment he sent it, Su Niannian replied.

"You sent it? I'll look right away."

Fifteen minutes later, the messages began bombarding him.

"v0.2 is so much stronger than v0.1. How did you manage the confidence scores for impact assessment?"

"Don't worry about how I did it. Test it first."

Five minutes later.

"Remember those five unknown Bugs we found last time? I just used v0.2 to generate patches with one click. All five passed! Han Luyi! I feel like I'm a developer now!"

She went silent for half a minute. The product manager was doing the math.

"Han Luyi, how are we pricing this thing in the future?"

"Haven't thought about it."

"Think about it soon. A tool that can save people two weeks of labor won't have trouble selling."

"Why are you still awake?"

"I'm testing your product. Stop changing the subject. You need to take pricing seriously."

Another minute passed.

"I'll start recruiting people tomorrow. Let's get twenty closed-beta users first. Make an invitation code system."

"Okay."

Han Luyi was just about to shut down his computer when Su Niannian sent another message.

It was not about v0.2. It was a link.

<AI Code Review Sector Heats Up: Another Startup Secures Angel Funding>

"Take a look at this."

Han Luyi clicked it open.

It was an in-depth analysis from a tech outlet. It focused on a startup called CodeSafe, which had just secured angel funding. There were faint traces of Dingsheng Affiliated Capital behind the investors. Its founder, Zhao Wenyuan, had a Stanford CS PhD and had spent three years at Google.

Product direction: AI-driven code review and risk assessment.

Han Luyi skimmed the rest of the article. CodeSafe had been founded last November and had been operating for five months. Its team had grown from three people to thirty. Its angel funding was enough to last at least half a year.

He opened Sight and scanned CodeSafe's official website.

[Core approach: large models + big data (asset-heavy)]

[Public beta date: April 27]

About three weeks from now.

His energy dropped by 8 points.

A line of fine print still hung at the bottom of the panel, at the end of the investment chain.

[Angel investment chain: Dingheng Venture Capital (LP includes Prosperity Group) → personal co-investment: Wang Zhiyuan]

Wang Zhiyuan.

Han Luyi stared at those three words for two seconds. Wang Zhiyuan had also been involved in Flash's angel round—the shell company Zhang Haoran had mentioned. And now he was here again.

A VP at Dingsheng, investing in startups everywhere. He was certainly busy.

He closed Sight.

Su Niannian's second message came through.

"Isn't this too much of a coincidence?"

"I saw it. Thirty people, money and a team."

"Are you panicking?"

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't. But they're taking the asset-heavy large-model route, while we're going lightweight. The routes are different. Heavy products burn money fast and iterate slowly; lightweight ones are the opposite. In the short term, their features may be more complete than ours, but we have a chance in the long run."

"How big of a chance?"

"I don't know. But they don't even have a product out yet, while our v0.2 worked tonight. Let's get the closed beta running first. Only user word of mouth gives us something to talk about."

Su Niannian did not reply until a while later.

"Okay. Give me the invitation codes tomorrow. I'll recruit people first."

He shut down his computer, picked up his phone, and browsed a tech forum for a while.

<Seven Classic Pitfalls in Recommendation System Architecture Overhauls> had surpassed twelve thousand views. There were several new private messages in his inbox—some asking for advice, some inviting him to write articles, and one from an ID he recognized: a former colleague from Dingsheng GG's data team who had joined at the same time as him.

"Hello, master. I'm a backend developer at a certain company, and we're currently running into the third pitfall you wrote about. Would it be convenient to chat privately?"

Han Luyi did not reply. That person had registered the forum account with a Dingsheng work email, which meant he still did not know who NullPointer was. But a Dingsheng employee had proactively come to NullPointer for help...

The highest-liked comment below the blog post read, "Who exactly is NullPointer? Analysis at this architectural level doesn't seem like something an ordinary developer could produce."

The 404 Group was blowing up too. Ma Xiaofei dropped a link: <Dingsheng Digital Announces Comprehensive Upgrade of Its Recommendation System, Covering All Short-Video and E-Commerce Applications Starting Next Week>.

Ma Xiaofei: "Damn, full rollout. Do you think it'll crash?"

Zhang Haoran: "They dared to roll out a system overhaul to everyone after just two months. What do you think?"

Han Luyi typed a few words: "It's not whether it will. It's when."

Ma Xiaofei: "??? You're that sure?"

Ma Xiaofei: "Then isn't Chen Bowen finished?"

Han Luyi did not reply again. He remembered the D-rating from his earlier Sight scan: 140 Bugs, with peak latency set to surge by 300%.

After the full rollout, it would not last 72 hours.