Dogs Wouldn't Even Use It

Seven days.

Easy to say.

Han Luyi felt as if he had gone back to his days at Dingsheng, sleeping less than five hours a day.

He wrote code at breakneck speed while using Sight to hunt down and fix missed bugs.

Su Niannian revised the launch plan from v0.1 to v0.4, refining the rollout process down to the minute.

Ma Xiaofei had finished filming the second video. After watching it, Han Luyi told him to change the title from "The Most Powerful AI Code Review Tool on the Entire Internet" to "Possibly the Most User-Friendly AI Code Review Tool."

Ma Xiaofei objected. "Is there a difference?"

"Yes. The payout is different when we get sued."

May 6th.

At three in the morning, Su Niannian was still revising the wording of the promotional copy. At four, Han Luyi finished fixing the last edge case. He slept for three hours at six, then got up at nine and splashed some water on his face.

At ten, BugKiller v1.0 went live on the official website, released under the name NullPointer. It launched simultaneously on the forums, V2EX, and Juejin. Notifications went out to the closed beta group. Emails reached seed users. Ma Xiaofei's second video was released at the same time.

It was live.

Han Luyi sat at the desk in his room, staring at the numbers on the registration dashboard.

The first thirty minutes were quiet.

3.

7.

12.

A message from Su Niannian came in. "Only twelve?"

"Only half an hour."

"I worked on the Code Review product line at Beaver Technology, the kind sold externally. A team of twenty people, with the marketing department backing a full promotional push, and eight months of work. On the first day of the public launch, we only got a little over five hundred registrations."

"So?"

"So I want five hundred daily active users on day one toooo!"

The first code repository connected. It was a Python Flask project with more than six thousand lines. BugKiller ran for fourteen seconds and reported seven bugs. The backend logs showed that the user had opened the first detection result and spent forty-three seconds on the impact assessment section.

Eleven o'clock. 47.

Noon. 89.

Su Niannian stopped talking. She just kept sending screenshots of the updated numbers.

At one in the afternoon, they broke one hundred fifty. The growth curve was accelerating, with each hour's increase surpassing the previous one. A classic word-of-mouth slope. Closed beta users had begun spreading it through their own tech groups.

Han Luyi took a sip of water. His hands trembled slightly. Not from nerves—three hours of sleep were starting to collect their debt.

Ma Xiaofei said, "The video's been out for three hours. The backend shows over a thousand people clicked from my video to BugKiller's registration page. Everyone, I, Ma Xiaofei, am the number one product pusher in the tech category."

Zhang Haoran said, "The top comment under your video says, 'The analysis of the second bug was dead-on.' You sure that wasn't planted?"

"You're the plant. That's a real fan of mine, okay?"

"Fine. Luyi, if this organic growth rate holds for three days, you can take the weekly active user numbers to investors."

"I'm not thinking that far ahead."

"It's not far. Trust me."

At three in the afternoon, the post reached third place on the forum's trending list. Ma Xiaofei's video hit eighty thousand views.

A long comment beneath the post was rapidly rising.

"We've used CodeSafe for two months since the closed beta. Today, we registered for BugKiller and ran both on the same project. BugKiller found three bugs that CodeSafe had never reported. One of them was the same type of issue that blew up production last month: a race condition in connection reuse. That incident affected sixty thousand users, and it took us two days to track down and fix. This one was still hiding there, and CodeSafe reported nothing at all.

"BugKiller's report said: 'Estimated trigger probability in high-concurrency scenarios: approximately 12%. Estimated monthly users affected: 50,000–60,000. Fix path: modify the connection reuse logic on line 1247. Estimated change: 3 lines of code.'

"Three lines of code. It took us two days to investigate the same problem last time.

"Let me put this objectively: CodeSafe? Not even dogs would use it."

Six hundred likes. A string of similar firsthand accounts followed beneath it.

At 4:12 in the afternoon, the backend went completely red.

API response times shot straight past the timeout threshold. Han Luyi opened the server panel and saw requests had surged fortyfold. The source IPs were highly concentrated, all targeting the /api/scan endpoint.

It was a DDoS attack.

He activated Sight.

Server traffic spread across his field of vision. Normal user requests were thin lines with a regular rhythm. The attack traffic was entirely different: three dark-red torrents poured in from three IP ranges at once, so dense they drowned out the normal traffic.

Sight displayed a diagnosis above the attack sources:

Three steps.

Block the IP ranges. Add rate limiting. Enable CDN protection.

Seven minutes. The monitoring dashboard turned from red to green.

He sent a message to the closed beta group. "We were down for a few minutes just now. Got hit by a DDoS attack. It's been handled."

"Getting attacked on the first day of public beta?"

"Who's in such a hurry?"

"You handled it alone? In seven minutes???"

Han Luyi did not respond. He opened the official website and wrote an incident postmortem, listing the attack time, duration, source IP ranges, and targeted endpoint.

Half an hour later, a new forum post appeared, titled: "Guess Who Would DDoS BugKiller on Its Public Beta Launch Day."

The top-liked comment said, "Let me lay out the timeline for everyone. The comparison post hit 600 likes at 4:00 p.m. The DDoS attack came at 4:12. Twelve minutes. That's it?"

The second said, "Last time it was sockpuppet posts. This time it's straight to DDoS. Next time, are they coming to smash his computer?"

The third was a technical discussion. Many people replied: "I work in security operations at a certain company, so let me give you some numbers. Our SOC has twelve people on rotating shifts and a full set of automated monitoring tools. Our DDoS response SLA is thirty minutes, and that's after countless drills with the playbook already written. He was alone. Seven minutes from detection to recovery. Ridiculous!"

"The person above is talking about a large company with a contingency plan. For a small team getting attacked for the first time, the normal process is: holy crap, why is it down → did the code blow up → spend forever checking logs before realizing it's DDoS → panic → submit a ticket to the cloud provider → wait for customer service → one or two hours would already be fast. Seven minutes? I wouldn't even have submitted the ticket yet."

"So is NullPointer one person or a team? One person building the product, fixing production issues, and fending off DDoS attacks—does he have three heads and six arms?"

"They couldn't even beat one guy with a DDoS attack. Seven minutes from attack to defense. Instant noodles wouldn't even be ready."

Six in the afternoon.

Registered users: 476.

Connected code repositories: 527.

Total bugs detected: 3,847.

476. Su Niannian was still twenty-four short of her target of five hundred.

Nine at night.

Han Luyi took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and opened the backend dashboard.

Su Niannian called, practically vibrating with excitement.

"Luyi! Six hundred and twelve!!!"

"Do you know what this means?!"

"A team of twenty people, big-company resources, eight months of work."

"On the first day of public release, they only got a little over five hundred registrations."

"A product you made by yourself."

"Six hundred and twelve registrations on day one."

"One person beat an entire big-company team!"

Han Luyi said, "It was the two of us."

Su Niannian fell silent for a while.

"Seriously, Luyi, you did it. We did it!"

After hanging up, Han Luyi looked at the drawing taped beside his monitor. There were three black spots on the large ladybug's red shell.

He reached out and folded down the curled corner of the paper.

His phone buzzed again. Gu Siyue.

"Congratulations. The numbers are good."

"Lawyer Gu follows tech products too?"

"I follow my clients."

He replied, "Thanks."

Ma Xiaofei's second video surpassed one hundred fifty thousand views. The top comment read: NullPointer, please make an appearance.

Han Luyi looked through the comments for a while, scrolled around, then backed out.

He opened his chat with Ma Xiaofei.

"For the next video, how about an interview? The BugKiller founder appears on camera."

Ma Xiaofei replied instantly. "??? You're revealing your identity??"

"The product has reached this stage. Staying anonymous is meaningless. Enterprise clients need contracts. We can't exactly sign them with NullPointer."

"!!!"

"You film it. Make an episode called 'Who Is NullPointer?' It'll get you more followers too."

There was no reply for quite a while. Han Luyi thought Ma Xiaofei might be hesitating.

Then a voice message arrived. When he played it, Ma Xiaofei's barely restrained excitement practically burst from the speaker.

"Old Han, do you know how long I've been waiting for this day?! I've written three versions of the script, you know? Three versions! Tomorrow! No, we can film tonight. I'll set up all the lighting—"

Han Luyi did not know whether to laugh or cry. "Don't rush."

He put down his phone.

Then activated Sight.

His experience had already reached 42%.

It had been 37% this morning.

The total bug detections in the backend paused at 4,215. Behind every record was a developer who had connected a repository, and BugKiller had found a problem for them.

The experience bar jumped again.

He opened the Lark document Su Niannian had just updated, BugKiller Public Beta Day One Postmortem. It was seven pages long. He scrolled to the final line, highlighted in red and bold.

"Recommend publicly revealing the founder's identity as soon as possible, converting NullPointer's community trust into brand equity."

"It's already being arranged."