The draft sat in the forum backend for four days. Feedback from twenty-three people went through three rounds of revisions before v0.3 was finalized.
Monday night, April 20. Su Niannian finished the final round of testing. "That's enough. Publish it."
Han Luyi opened the draft. The title was still the one from last week: A New Product: BugKiller.
He spent forty minutes revising the main text. The first three paragraphs were purely technical. Two anonymized screenshots of v0.3 scan results were inserted in the middle. The final line read: "Limited testing opens today, with fifty spots available. Apply by filling out the form. First come, first served."
He added one final statement: The data sources were compliant, and the source code could be audited.
Published.
After posting it, he switched back to the editor to work on v0.4. By one-thirty in the morning, he had finished the framework. He tossed the last box of frozen dumplings from the fridge into a pot. Once they were cooked, he carried them to his computer and casually glanced at the post.
Internal testing applications submitted: 127.
Fifty spots. Three and a half hours. One hundred and 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 checked the forum?" and "Get up already."
Rubbing his eyes, he opened the forum.
Internal testing 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 is making a product??? What kind of cross-industry robbery is this??"
"What the hell is impact assessment? It finds Bugs and can tell me how many users will die after launch? Is this even legal?"
"NullPointer became a legend after analyzing the Dingsheng crash. Now he's turned that ability into a product. A legendary master descending to open a shop, while ordinary mortals tremble."
Someone had made a poll: "Do you think BugKiller can take down the code review tools already on the market?"
Over twelve hundred votes. Sixty-seven percent had chosen "Possibly."
There were unread messages in the 404 Group too. Ma Xiaofei had sent him a string of question marks.
"Bro! Your post made the hot topics! You're all over my feed! Several major tech accounts are reposting it!"
Zhang Haoran popped up. "'NullPointer makes a product' is third on Maimai's trending posts. Be careful—people might figure out who you are."
Ma Xiaofei said, "Want me to help promote it? I've got sixty thousand followers now!"
Han Luyi replied, "No."
Ma Xiaofei: "?"
Zhang Haoran said, "NullPointer is anonymous right now. If you promote it, the profile gets narrower."
Ma Xiaofei was silent for five seconds before replying with two words: "I'll endure."
By noon, the number of applications had passed eight hundred.
Han Luyi selected the first batch from them—fifty spots, all given to those with the most compatible tech stacks. Twenty minutes later, every account had been activated.
At two in the afternoon, feedback from the first batch of internal testers began pouring in.
Notifications from three channels—the forum, WeChat direct messages, and email—were impossible to keep up with.
"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 this module really is scheduled for phased rollout next week. You saved us."
"I scanned my own open-source project. Eight issues. Verified every single one, and they were all real. Three were ones I knew about but never fixed, while five I had no idea existed."
Han Luyi replied to the direct messages one by one. After a while, his fingers grew sore. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water, then came back and continued.
"This isn't a code review tool. It's code review plus a risk warning system. NullPointer, did you open your third eye or something?"
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 'calculation errors in 0.3% of order amounts during peak periods.' I did the math. Eighty thousand orders a day, 0.3% is 240 orders, average order value is 85. That's twenty thousand a day, six hundred thousand a month. One Bug. Six hundred thousand."
A string of replies followed.
"Six hundred thousand? At that return on investment, I'd buy BugKiller no matter what it costs."
"Don't just praise it. Tell us the downsides."
"The downside: there are too few spots. I suggest NullPointer open ten thousand."
It was dark outside. He hadn't turned on the lights, and the glow of the screen reflected off his face. Laughter drifted faintly from Lin Duoduo's apartment next door, 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 sorting the feedback since the afternoon. There was a Lark spreadsheet with four columns: feature module, user's exact words, priority, and suggested solution. By seven in the evening, it had forty-seven rows.
Her voice was a little hoarse when she called.
"Luyi, I took two weeks of annual leave from Beaver Technology."
He was modifying 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 anyway, and no one cares whether I take leave. I'm putting these two weeks entirely into BugKiller."
Han Luyi said nothing.
Su Niannian said, "Tomorrow morning at nine, Bug Café. Send me all the internal testing data. I'll review it tonight first. Also, I've figured out the iteration direction for v0.4. Don't start working yet. We'll discuss it tomorrow."
"I just finished the v0.4 framework."
Su Niannian fell 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 spent the whole afternoon ranking them for nothing."
"You didn't ask."
"Tomorrow at nine. Don't be late."
At eleven that night, twenty-six hours after the post had gone up.
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 flickered.
BugKiller helped internal testers discover and locate multiple real Bugs. System assessment: Batch 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.
"There are doubts regarding the source of BugKiller's Bug detection mode database. I recommend that the author disclose the data sources and training methodology. Otherwise, it cannot be ruled out 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 paragraph. The wording was precise, the grammar polished. It did not sound like a rant 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 had already started 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.
Before you continue