One More Thing

The draft had sat in the forum backend for four days. Feedback from twenty-three people went through three rounds of revisions before v0.3 was finally finalized.

Monday night, April 20. After completing the final round of testing, Su Niannian said, "That's enough. Publish it."

Han Luyi opened the draft. The title was still the one he had written last week: A New Product: BugKiller.

He spent forty minutes revising the body. The opening three paragraphs were purely technical, with two screenshots of v0.3 scan results inserted in the middle, all anonymized. The ending was a single sentence: "Limited testing opens today, with 50 slots available. Apply by filling out the form. First come, first served."

At the end, he added a statement: the data sources were compliant, and the source code could be audited.

Published.

After posting, he switched back to the editor to work on v0.4. By one-thirty in the morning, the framework was done, and the last box of frozen dumplings in the fridge went into the pot. He carried them to his computer once they were cooked and casually glanced at the post.

Number of internal test applications submitted: 127.

Fifty slots. Three and a half hours. One hundred twenty-seven applicants.

The next morning, Han Luyi was jolted awake by his phone.

It was Su Niannian. She had sent eight messages in a row. The first three were "???" "Have you seen the forum?" and "Get up!"

Rubbing his eyes, he opened the forum.

Internal test applications: 638. Views: 12,400. Replies: 289. Direct messages: 67 unread.

He replied to Su Niannian: "Looking now."

Leaning against the headboard, Han Luyi scrolled through the comments from beginning to end.

"NullPointer made a product??? What kind of cross-industry robbery is this??"

"What the hell is impact assessment? It finds Bugs and can even tell me how many users will get screwed after launch? Is this legal?"

"NullPointer became a legend after analyzing the Dingsheng crash. Now he's turned that ability into a product. A legendary expert descending to open a shop—the mortals are trembling."

Someone had made a poll: "Do you think BugKiller can take out the code review tools currently on the market?"

More than twelve hundred votes. Sixty-seven percent had chosen "Possibly."

There were unread messages in the 404 group too. Ma Xiaofei had thrown a string of question marks at him.

"Bro! Your post is trending! You've taken over my Moments feed! Several major tech accounts are reposting it!"

Zhang Haoran popped up. "'NullPointer makes a product' is third on Maimai's trending list. Be careful that people don't figure out who you are."

Ma Xiaofei said, "Want me to promote it? I've got sixty thousand followers now!"

Han Luyi said, "No need."

Ma Xiaofei: "?"

Zhang Haoran said, "NullPointer is anonymous right now. If you promote it, the profile gets narrower."

Ma Xiaofei went silent for five seconds before replying with two words: "I'll endure."

By noon, the applications had passed eight hundred.

Han Luyi selected the first batch from among them: fifty slots, all given to applicants with the best tech-stack compatibility. Twenty minutes later, all the accounts had been activated.

At two in the afternoon, feedback from the first batch of internal testers began pouring in.

Forum notifications, WeChat direct messages, and emails—alerts from all three channels came faster than he could clear them.

"I scanned our company's core service and found six Bugs we didn't know about, two of them high-risk. The impact assessment said that if one of them isn't fixed, it'll affect around 120,000 users within a week of launch. We checked, and that module really is scheduled for staged rollout next week. You saved us."

"I scanned my own open-source project. Eight issues. Verified them one by one, and every single one was real. Three were things I knew about but never fixed, and five were things I had no idea existed."

Han Luyi replied to the direct messages one by one. After a while, his fingers started to ache, so he went to the kitchen for a glass of water, then returned and kept going.

"This isn't a code review tool. It's code review plus a risk warning system. NullPointer, did you open your third eye?"

One of the top comments on the forum set off a heated discussion.

"The impact assessment is kind of terrifying. It said one of my Bugs would cause '0.3% of order amounts to be calculated incorrectly during peak hours.' I did the math. Eighty thousand orders a day, 0.3% is 240 orders, average order value is 85—twenty thousand a day, six hundred thousand a month. One Bug. Six hundred thousand."

A string of replies followed beneath it.

"Six hundred thousand? If BugKiller can calculate ROI like that, I'd buy it no matter how much it costs."

"Don't just praise it. Tell us the downsides."

"The downside: too few slots. I suggest NullPointer open ten thousand."

It had gone dark outside. He did not turn on the lights, and the glow of the screen reflected off his face. Lin Duoduo's laughter drifted faintly from next door in 501. She was probably watching cartoons.

The newest forum post read, "I ran into that Java issue too. NullPointer replied to me and said v0.4 will improve it. Do you know what after-sales support is? This is after-sales support."

Su Niannian had been organizing feedback since the afternoon. In a Lark spreadsheet, there were four columns: feature module, user's original wording, priority, and suggested solution. By seven that evening, there were forty-seven rows.

Her voice was a little hoarse when she called.

"Luyi, I took two weeks off from Beaver Technology."

He was editing code, and his hands stopped over the keyboard.

"You don't need to—"

"You're coding, fixing Bugs, replying to users, organizing feedback, writing documentation. How many jobs are you doing at once? My project was taken away ages ago, and no one cares whether I take leave. I'm putting these two weeks entirely into BugKiller."

Han Luyi said nothing.

Su Niannian said, "Nine tomorrow morning, Bug Café. Send me all the internal test data. I'll look through it tonight. Also, I've figured out the direction for v0.4's iteration. Don't start yet—wait until we talk tomorrow."

"I just finished the framework for v0.4."

Su Niannian went silent for three seconds.

"Send it to me."

Five minutes later, she replied: "The feature priorities are exactly the same as the ones I ranked."

Two seconds later, Su Niannian sent a voice message: "Why didn't you tell me you'd already finished it? I wasted an entire afternoon ranking them."

"You didn't ask."

"Nine tomorrow. Don't be late."

At eleven that night, twenty-six hours after the post went live.

Applications: 2,147. Views: 43,000. Replies: 687.

A tech media editor left a real-name comment: "Requesting an interview with NullPointer." More than a hundred replies lined up beneath it.

The panel flashed.

BugKiller helped internal test users discover and locate multiple real Bugs. System judgment: Bulk assistance.

Han Luyi closed the panel and prepared to shut down his computer.

Out of habit, he refreshed the post once more.

A new comment had appeared at the very top of the replies. Three minutes ago.

"BugKiller's Bug detection model database has questionable sources. I suggest the author disclose the data sources and training methodology; otherwise, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that unauthorized commercial data was used for training. As a practitioner in the same field, I believe data compliance is the foundation of a product's credibility."

Account name: TechEthicsWatch.

Registration date: today. Posts: zero. Replies: zero. The avatar was the default gray one.

Its only activity was that statement. The wording was precise and the grammar polished. It did not sound like a complaint from a tech community. It sounded like a statement drafted by a lawyer.

Han Luyi glanced at the list of likes below.

Third one down.

CodeSafe Official.

CodeSafe's public beta was probably still a week away. Before its product had even launched, it was already liking posts questioning someone else's.

Han Luyi took a screenshot of the comment and sent it to Gu Siyue.

Then he closed the forum.