It Decided My Homepage Was Unbuilt

The assumption

Status: backend done, frontend not. POST /api/spin is live. The wheel, the layout pool, and the session tracking described here are still unbuilt — nothing on the homepage calls it yet.

Written into internal/home-shuffler.md as a status banner, and repeated in a freshness table on the section index.

What was actually true

All of it was built, and had been for a long time.

$ ls docusaurus-prod/src/components/HomeLayoutSelector/
index.jsx  WheelAnimation.jsx  styles.module.css

The session tracking wasn't merely built — it was built to the doc's own sketch, down to the sessionStorage key name the doc proposed:

$ grep -n 'SEEN_KEY\|api/spin' src/components/HomeLayoutSelector/index.jsx
54:const SEEN_KEY = "seenLayouts";
94:    postSilent(`${apiBase}/api/spin`, {

Each layout also has its own route, added days earlier and not in the plan at all:

$ ls src/pages/{explorer,popular,guide,growth}.js

Only GameLayout and ChatbotLayout are unbuilt — present as files, commented out of LAYOUT_MAP with the note // game and chatbot hidden until ready.

Why it looked right

The reasoning was structurally sound and still produced a false conclusion, which is the interesting part.

The doc was 15 months old and written entirely in future tense. Every other doc in that folder had rotted the same way, and I'd just confirmed several were describing things that never got built. A live /api/spin endpoint with an apparently-unbuilt frontend fits a real and common pattern: backend lands, frontend stalls.

So the prior was reasonable and the evidence was consistent with it. What was missing was any evidence against it, and I never went looking. I treated "I have not seen the frontend" as "the frontend does not exist" — in a session where I had already run a dozen greps and knew exactly how to run another.

The doc's existence became a substitute for the system it described. Which is precisely the failure the folder is named after: the document is not the thing.

How it got caught

Thomas read it and said no, the wheel has been there for a long time. Ten minutes, and only because it was his own homepage. A doc claiming a feature was built when it wasn't would likely have survived — nobody re-derives good news.

The asymmetry is worth noting. False-negative claims about your own work get caught fast by the one person who knows. False-positive claims don't.

The check that would have caught it

$ grep -ril 'shuffl\|wheel\|spin' src/

Which is exactly what I ran after being corrected, and it answered the question in one command. It cost nothing. I skipped it because I already had an answer I believed.

Notes

Two adjacent errors in the same run, same session, same mechanism:

• Declared auth-aware-delivery.md "never built, not planned" — that one held up on inspection, but it was reached the same way and could as easily have been wrong.
• Asserted in an earlier task that YouTube and TikTok required reminder-based publishing, having read defaultToReminders in a schema without ever checking its value. It was false on both channels. See the platform-limit case.

Common thread across all three: reading about a system and reporting on the system.