Game Dev Story

Han Luyi realized that both Su Niannian and Lu Mingzhou were looking at him.

"No need to cancel."

No emotion showed on his face. "Go talk to them."

Lu Mingzhou took a moment to process that. "All right. I'll revise the materials."

He walked over and erased the numbers on the whiteboard.

Han Luyi returned to his workstation and turned on his computer to look up the news from earlier.

What was CodeSafe's inference cost per code scan? He knew BugKiller's costs—not cheap. CodeSafe had a heavier model architecture, so it could only be more expensive. Permanently free, automatically integrated, three million developers—how many times would each person scan code every day? Who was paying for all that inference? Subsidizing it with cloud service profits? That would mean Dingsheng Cloud was supporting an entire code review tool. For what? It couldn't be just to target BugKiller. If it wasn't aimed at him, then it was aimed at the ecosystem. CodeSafe was a freebie meant to keep developers on Dingsheng Cloud. Looked at that way, the situation wasn't as bad as he had first imagined. Not many of BugKiller's customers were on Dingsheng Cloud to begin with. If Dingsheng was going to wage an ecosystem war, Kunlun, Celestial Pivot, and Azure Peak were the ones who should be worried.

A chaotic flood of thoughts surged through his mind, but he reached no conclusion. By then, the news page had finished loading, and Han Luyi opened Sight.

That was it?

It had nothing to do with what he had just been thinking. They were simply trying to boost daily active users.

But what did they want higher daily active users for?

Sight gave no answer.

Han Luyi called Su Niannian and Lu Mingzhou over for another small meeting.

"The impact on us isn't as big as we imagined. It'll also tie us more closely to the three cloud providers," Han Luyi said.

"There'll be pressure on pricing," she said. "They're free, while we charge three thousand a month. If a tech lead wants to buy our product, the boss will ask, 'Why not use the free one?'"

"Like Microsoft's Copilot. Even if it isn't very good, it's still an AI," Han Luyi said.

An awkward silence followed. Neither Su Niannian nor Lu Mingzhou got the joke.

"So the key isn't whether the product is good or not, but making users feel the difference for themselves." Su Niannian brought the topic back. "We need someone dedicated to that. We also need to build up the community, make good use of Azure Peak's events, and have Ma Xiaofei shoot a few promotional videos."

"Let's hire people first." Han Luyi rubbed his temples and summarized.

Three days after the recruitment posting went up, they had already received more than seventy résumés.

Han Luyi and Su Niannian sat facing each other, each with a stack of printed résumés, doing the initial screening.

"This one." Su Niannian held one up. "Eight hundred words for the self-introduction, two and a half lines for project experience."

Han Luyi glanced at it. "A novelist?"

The résumé was slapped onto the left.

"This person didn't even change the company name. 'Your esteemed company, Cloudrise Technology.'"

"Probably submitted by a bot."

After flipping through a few more, Su Niannian suddenly laughed and turned a résumé around for him to see.

Proficient in the Microsoft Office suite, skilled at team-building planning, passionate about square dancing.

"What position did he apply for?"

"Backend developer."

They both laughed.

When Han Luyi turned to the next résumé, he opened Sight.

The instant the panel appeared, he regretted it.

One résumé had more than forty fields listed, from technical skills to his remaining mortgage balance.

He glanced at the résumé beside it, from a Dingsheng P7 engineer who had also been his colleague at his previous company.

Everything Sight provided was useful, but it was also far too comprehensive. Han Luyi only needed to judge one thing: was this person worth inviting for an interview? But Sight spread every bit of information out in front of him, making résumés more exhausting to review than without it.

He flipped through two more. Each time he turned a page, an entire screenful of panels appeared. Technical skills and weaknesses were buried amid things like "salary flexibility," "probability of lying," and "emotional anchor." He had to pick them out himself.

What was it like?

Like an API returning a full JSON response when he only needed three fields and everything else was noise.

Couldn't this be customized?

He put down the résumé, closed his eyes, and tried to find a "Settings" button in his field of vision.

The moment the thought moved, an interface resembling a code editor popped up.

He froze.

[Energy: 437/500]

It had directly cost him fifty points.

So Sight was programmable?

He tried to "write" an instruction: only retain core skills, weaknesses, work style, team compatibility, stability, and hidden information; filter out personal privacy.

He scanned the P7 résumé again.

[Chen Jianye]

[Core Skills: Large-scale system architecture]

[Weakness: Requires control, unsuitable for small teams]

[Work Style: Highly controlling]

[Team Compatibility: Low (requires a stronger leader)]

[Stability: Low (transitional period, highly likely to leave within six months)]

[Hidden: Interviewing with three companies simultaneously]

Seven lines. Much cleaner than before.

Han Luyi's playful side surfaced. He made a few more adjustments, then looked at the same résumé again.

[Chen Jianye]

[Specialty: Large-scale system architecture]

The next one—

[Li Ting]

[Specialty: None]

And another—

[Zhao Lei]

[Specialty: Distributed systems expert]

Han Luyi went back and dug out the square-dancing guy's résumé—

[Niu Yifan]

[Specialty: Square dancing]

Heh heh. This was fun.

"What are you laughing about?" Su Niannian looked up at him.

"I feel like I'm playing Game Dev Story," Han Luyi said.

Su Niannian played games too, so she knew what he meant. "If running a company were really like playing a business simulation game, that would be great. Too bad you can't see everyone's stat panels."

Han Luyi didn't respond and lowered his head to continue reviewing résumés.

[Energy: 337/500]

It took quite a bit of energy, but it was kind of addictive.