Encirclement

August. Bug Café. Three in the afternoon.

Su Niannian's laptop sat on the table, with six browser tabs lined up: Lark documents, backend data, media screenshots. She had been talking since one-thirty, and by now she had downed two iced lattes, leaving her voice a little hoarse.

Han Luyi leaned on the table with one hand, propping up his chin as he listened.

He had seen the data. Su Niannian had sent the July monthly report at four in the morning—eleven pages. 18,400 registered users, 12,300 monthly active users, 142 paying teams, and monthly revenue of 426,000. It looked like they were still growing.

But the turning point had already appeared.

"New daily registrations were 390 in the first week of July and 402 in the fourth. The blue line barely moved; individual developers are still increasing." Su Niannian pointed at the two trend lines on the screen. "But the orange line—new paying teams—went from twelve in the first week to three in the fourth. It fell off a cliff."

"The paid conversion rate dropped from 3.1% to 1.4%." She switched to another page and pointed at the number in the upper-right corner. "July's inference costs were 83,000."

Han Luyi looked at the report without saying anything.

"Every scan runs through the model once, and large repositories need several passes. With 12,000 monthly active users, that comes to nearly a hundred thousand inference requests per month," Su Niannian said. "When monthly active users were three thousand in May, inference costs were 21,000."

Their users had quadrupled, and so had their costs, while revenue had only doubled.

"Free users account for 88% of monthly active users. They consume three-quarters of our computing power and bring in zero revenue." She closed the laptop. "Enterprises don't dare pay, and individuals don't need to pay. At this rate, inference costs could swallow a third of monthly revenue by year-end."

Everything Su Niannian had mentioned was inference cost. But if they wanted to retain customers, the model needed constant iteration, and training costs were the real bulk of it.

Han Luyi knew all of this. On the night CodeSafe officially integrated with Dingsheng Cloud in mid-July, Su Niannian had sent him screenshots, and he had known things would not be simple from then on. But after a month, the situation was even uglier than they had expected.

Within two weeks, six industry analysis pieces had appeared across four media platforms, their arguments so neatly aligned it was as if they had been broken out from the same outline: "Independent developer products are flexible but lack enterprise-grade assurance." "The entry of major corporations signals that the field has entered maturity." "The true moat lies not in detection rates, but ecosystem integration and compliance capabilities." BugKiller was never mentioned by name, but every paragraph was about BugKiller.

The clients were beginning to waver as well. Five paying users had asked about refund policies. They were waiting to see how BugKiller would respond to Dingsheng.

"Niannian," Han Luyi said. "What are you thinking?"

"First, we need to figure out what cards they're playing."

She flipped the Lark document to a page containing a relationship diagram. Five boxes surrounded a circle in the middle, arrows shooting in from every direction, with screenshots and links pasted beside every box.

"Channels, media, clients, capital, pricing. They came at us from all five fronts at once." Su Niannian tapped the boxes one by one. "You've seen the channels and media. Those six articles practically wrote our name outright. But the client side is dirtier."

She enlarged a WeChat screenshot. "CodeSafe's salespeople have directly invited the technical leads of our paying clients out for coffee, pulling them into some kind of 'Enterprise Advisory Committee.' At least three have been approached."

Her finger moved to the final two boxes. "Someone in the VC circle has been saying the market landscape is already settled and that they don't recommend investing in startups anymore. The community is also spreading word that CodeSafe is about to launch a free trial. Nothing has been officially announced, but the rumor is already out there."

She withdrew her hand from the screen.

"Five fronts, the same time window, the same rhythm. Someone is coordinating it all."

Han Luyi looked at her.

"You put all this together?"

"It's not like I only found out about it today." Su Niannian's tone was calm. "It's been a month. I've been tracking it all along."

Han Luyi said nothing. He stared at the diagram for several seconds, then closed his eyes briefly.

When he opened them again, Sight activated.

The panel appeared. The same five fronts Su Niannian had summarized were marked by Sight as well. Their coordination was extremely high, and all vectors pointed to the same strategic center. It matched her judgment.

He did not linger there. He followed the lines of connection deeper, searching for what she could not see.

A few seconds later—

[CodeSafe core detection engine reconstruction progress ≈35%; architectural flaws remain unresolved]

[After integrating with Dingsheng Cloud, API adaptation and deployment changes were prioritized; core capability improvements were postponed]

[False-positive rate for large projects remains >25%]

[BugKiller technical advantage: leads in detection rate / false-positive rate / impact assessment across all three metrics; cannot be caught up with in the short term]

Every item was marked clearly.

Han Luyi looked further down.

[Fix path: —]

Empty.

He stared at that field for three seconds. Sight flickered there, as if trying to generate something, then went dark again.

Level 2 Sight could provide fix paths for code bugs—which file to change, which line to change, and how to change it. But faced with a systemic competitive disadvantage like "their brand is stronger, their channels are stronger, their capital is stronger," it had no answer.

This was not a bug. It was a problem he could not patch.

Han Luyi turned off Sight.

Su Niannian was still waiting for him to speak.

"Technically, we're still ahead," Han Luyi said. "After integrating with Dingsheng Cloud, CodeSafe has been busy with API adaptation. Their false-positive rate on large projects is still their old problem."

Su Niannian did not ask how he knew. She had long grown used to the occasional "technical intuition" that came from Han Luyi.

"So?"

"But it doesn't matter." Han Luyi stood and walked to the window. "When enterprise clients make purchasing decisions, detection rate is in the fourth column of the evaluation form. The first three are: 'Have we heard of this brand?' 'Will this company go under tomorrow?' and 'Who will cover us if something goes wrong?' The name Dingsheng is a perfect answer to all three."

Su Niannian leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

"Then we don't fight for the first three columns."

Han Luyi turned around.

"Dingsheng Cloud's ecosystem is closed. They can't build a community." Su Niannian sat up straight and reopened her laptop. "Open-source all the SDKs. Let the community write its own plugins—VS Code, JetBrains, GitHub Action, GitLab CI. Leave the core engine untouched, but open every interface."

"Not the model."

"Of course not. We open-source the scaffolding, not the brain," Su Niannian said. "Dingsheng can crush us through distribution, but it can't build a community ecosystem. Those 150,000 enterprise developers belong to Dingsheng, but the plugin ecosystem can belong to us."

Han Luyi thought for a moment. "We need to solve the cost problem too. Add a Personal Pro tier at ninety-nine a month. Unlimited private repositories, full impact assessment reports, priority queue. Cut the free-tier scan limit from sixty per month to twenty. How many heavy users do we have now?"

"Those with more than forty scans a month? Eight hundred to a thousand. At a 15% conversion rate, that's another twelve to fifteen thousand in monthly revenue," Su Niannian said. "It won't cover inference costs, but it can at least stop the bleeding. And once these people get used to it, they're also more likely to push the team version within their companies."

"Unfortunately, that still won't break the deadlock," Su Niannian said.

Han Luyi looked at her. "First, we survive. We'll find an opportunity."

The two fell silent for a while.

Su Niannian stood and packed up her laptop. "We'll put out the plan tomorrow. Open-source SDKs, Personal Pro pricing, free-tier limits. The three-piece set."

She stuffed the laptop into a backpack nearly as big as she was.

"Luyi, you're becoming more and more like a qualified CEO."

With that, she walked toward the door.

Nine at night. Room 502. Desk lamp.

Two unread messages on his phone.

Ma Xiaofei: "Old Han, I saw a bunch of sponsored hit pieces against BugKiller today. Want me to make a video and hit back? I've already saved all the material."

President Li from Cross-Border Reach: "President Han, headhunters recently contacted our technical lead, saying CodeSafe is forming an Enterprise Client Advisory Committee. Is everything... okay on your end?"

He replied to Ma Xiaofei: "Not yet. Let me think about it some more."

After a pause, he added, "Thanks."

He replied to President Li: "Everything is normal. Thank you for your trust."

He opened the code editor. The impact assessment module refactor for v1.3 was a requirement Su Niannian had raised last week; enterprise clients complained that scans for large projects were too slow.

He typed a few lines of code. Deleted them. Then typed two more.

The BugKiller backend dashboard sat in the bottom-right corner. New registrations today: 341. About the same as last month. New paying teams: 0.

Registrations were still rising, but no one was paying.

He closed his eyes briefly. The afterimage of that diagnostic report from the afternoon still hovered at the edge of his consciousness, its five attack vectors marked with absolute clarity. Below them, the field for the fix path remained empty.

It was like a CT scan with the lesion clearly identified, but no medicine could be prescribed.

Beside the monitor were Duoduo's crayon drawing of a large ladybug and Lin Wanqing's fabric ladybug painting. One large, one small.

His phone rang. It was Gu Siyue.

"Are you free at nine tomorrow morning? I've organized a draft framework for compliance: data security, privacy clauses, liability waivers. I want to go over the broad direction with you first. If there are no issues, I'll move forward directly."

Han Luyi paused. "Is it urgent?"

"Given your current situation, very."