The Only Standard

At dusk, Han Luyi ate some fried rice at Bug Café when his phone buzzed. Su Niannian had sent him a link.

Three Bottom Lines for the AI Code Review Track, by Zhao Wenyuan.

Han Luyi opened it.

The three-thousand-word article never mentioned BugKiller by name, yet every paragraph was aimed straight at him.

"The compliance of training data sources is the cornerstone of a product's credibility. When a product's core data sources cannot be verified by an independent third party, users' trust is built on quicksand."

"Anonymity is a right, but it does not mean immunity from responsibility. When an anonymous identity is tied to commercial interests, the community has the right to demand a higher standard of transparency."

"What this field needs is not the narrative of a lone hero making a splash, but an engineered system that can withstand scrutiny."

The signature at the bottom read: Zhao Wenyuan, PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, former senior Google engineer, founder of CodeSafe.

The article was simultaneously posted to several tech communities and was quickly republished by numerous tech media outlets.

The comments section was already at war.

"Honestly, I'm a little shaken after reading this. NullPointer's detection rate is impressive, but why is it so strong? The data source statement is one sentence long. Where's the third-party verification?"

"Every word in Dr. Zhao's article hits the mark. Being anonymous while making a product isn't the issue. Being anonymous, opaque, and making money at the same time—that combination is a problem."

"I recommended BugKiller to my team during the beta. Kind of regretting it now. What if there really is a problem with the training data?"

"...So does no one care that CodeSafe Official liked a sockpuppet post from TechEthicsWatch?"

The last comment had sunk to the bottom of the second page, with barely any likes. The tide was turning.

Han Luyi finished reading the article at Bug Café, his expression grim.

Old Zhou was wiping glasses behind the counter. He leaned over and glanced at him. "Who pissed you off?"

"Nothing. Competitors taking shots at each other."

"Programmers do that too?"

"People who write code don't. People who make PowerPoints do."

Old Zhou laughed.

A message from Su Niannian came in. "Finished reading it?"

Han Luyi called Su Niannian. "I just finished it."

Su Niannian skipped the pleasantries and spoke quickly. "He's too underhanded. On the surface, he's talking about industry standards, but he's really slapping two labels on us: 'anonymous' and 'opaque data sources.' Look at the comments. People are already asking who NullPointer is. He isn't just attacking you. He wants to set the rules. If he gets to set them, you'll be judged within his framework forever."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

"Don't take his bait. He talks standards; I talk results. Put the detection rate on the table. Everything else is nonsense."

The other end went quiet for a second. "Okay. I'll organize the beta data first?"

"Yeah. Detection rate, false positive rate, impact assessment coverage. Put them alongside CodeSafe's public numbers."

"Give me twenty minutes."

After hanging up, Han Luyi got up and went home.

He sat at his desk and opened a new document.

Title: Detection Rate Is Everything.

He finished twelve hundred words before eight o'clock.

It was short, discussing only one thing from start to finish: what made a good code review tool.

"Users don't care who your founder is, how many PhDs your team has, or how many pages your white paper spends explaining data sources. Users care about one thing: can you find the bugs in my code?"

"If you can find them, you're a good tool. If you can't, everything you say is nonsense."

"These are the figures from BugKiller's first batch of beta users."

A table, three rows of numbers: detection hit rate, false positive rate, and impact assessment coverage. Each column included the beta sample size and user verification ratio.

"Starting today, this data will be updated in real time on the BugKiller website. No filtering, no polishing. Any peer, media outlet, or user is welcome to verify it at any time. Any competing product is also welcome to publish comparable data, so we can put it side by side."

The final line read: "Whether a tool is good or not, one run will tell you."

Posted.

Twenty minutes later, the replies had passed two hundred, with more than seven hundred likes.

"That last line killed me."

"Dr. Zhao spent three thousand words setting the rules. NullPointer didn't even write a thousand, just slammed the numbers onto the table: Come on, compare! The difference in scale is huge."

"The screenshot of CodeSafe Official liking TechEthicsWatch's sockpuppet post got dug up again. What an ugly look."

"TechEthicsWatch had zero posts and zero replies, registered yesterday and vanished today. Do we still need hard proof that it's a sockpuppet?"

Zhao Wenyuan pinned a reply on his blog. "This article is not aimed at any specific product."

The top reply beneath it had twenty-three hundred likes.

"Dr. Zhao, your article was published thirty-six hours after BugKiller's beta post. Do you usually only start caring about industry standards after a competing product takes off?"

Zhao Wenyuan did not reply again.

Friday afternoon, Ma Xiaofei tossed a short video link into the 404 Group.

"Straight to the top on the first move!"

The title was: <I Tried the Hottest AI Code Review Tool on the Internet, BugKiller, and the Result Was...>

Han Luyi clicked it open. It was Ma Xiaofei's style: fast-paced, packed with reaction memes, exaggerated yet compelling. He used one of his own small open-source projects for the demonstration. Once BugKiller finished running, it found three bugs he had never known about, each with an impact assessment and a fix recommendation.

"This thing scanned my code once and dug up every land mine I buried three months ago."

"The second bug was even crazier. It said there was a chance of deadlock under high concurrency. I was like, this trash project of mine barely has any concurrency. But when I looked closer, this method was referenced by another project, and that project had high-concurrency scenarios. How did it know? How did it know??"

"The third one... forget it, I'm not showing it. For three whole months, I had one misspelled environment variable. The fact that production didn't blow up was pure luck. Embarrassing."

His closing summary read: "There are two kinds of tools. One makes you think, 'Not bad.' The other makes you immediately go dig through your own codebase after watching. BugKiller is the second kind. It's in free beta, not an ad. But NullPointer is welcome to pay me."

Zhang Haoran said in the group, "How many lines does that project even have? Three bugs is a pretty high hit rate."

Ma Xiaofei: "Shut up."

Han Luyi: "Didn't you say it wasn't an ad?"

Ma Xiaofei: "ICBC 6222 XXXX XXXX XXXX, recipient Ma Xiaofei. Thank you, boss."

In forty-eight hours, the video hit one hundred twenty thousand views. Ma Xiaofei gained nearly ten thousand followers, charging straight toward seventy thousand. BugKiller broke out of the beta-testing circle on tech forums and reached a broader tech audience.

After seeing the numbers, Su Niannian sent one message: "Ma Xiaofei's pretty good. This video worked better than two weeks of promotional copy from me."

Han Luyi screenshotted it and sent it to Ma Xiaofei, who replied instantly. "Goddess Su??? You two talk every day now???"

"She helps review the product."

"Review. The. Product. Got it, got it."

Monday.

Su Niannian sent three screenshots without a single word.

The first was a tech media headline: <CodeSafe Officially Enters Public Beta: "The Most Complete AI Code Review Solution," Built by a Stanford PhD Team>.

The second was a popular tech forum post: <My First Week with CodeSafe: Its Enterprise Integration Is Seriously Strong>. The poster had tested Python, JavaScript, and Java, concluding that it "surpassed every code detection tool currently on the market. The integration documentation is even better written than the product itself, and it works right out of the box."

The third was a screenshot of Zhao Wenyuan's social media post. No one knew who had leaked it.

Only four words.

"Let the product speak."

The BugKiller beta group was discussing it too. "CodeSafe's in public beta now. When are we launching ours?"

Su Niannian said nothing, and neither did Han Luyi.

On the forum homepage, NullPointer's post still sat at number one among the hot posts, with seven thousand likes. Zhao Wenyuan had not updated in three days.

Han Luyi opened CodeSafe's website. On the registration page, the numbers for its first week were still climbing.

He activated Sight.

Gray streams of code rose from beneath the page. Front end, back end, data pipelines—CodeSafe's technical architecture spread across the screen like an X-ray diagram.

He watched for a few seconds, then turned off Sight and closed the page.

His expression did not change. He opened his editor and continued writing v0.4.