Make the next step explicit

Thursday gave Steve’s projects more usable handovers: a customer can enter a card-free evaluation, an invitation can be shared, and a designer can be used on the live site. The remaining work was equally specific: narrower article transactions, reliable source-provider requests and proposals that still need implementation or commercial validation.

• GrowthScout · ship assisted trials with explicit activation and expiry. Private admin controls now create organisations without a card, grant article and AI credits, and set or extend a real trial deadline. A website transfers paused, then activates against the destination’s allowances. Later fixes support organisations with unfinished checkout and include ten tracked AI-visibility prompts. Payment begins only when the customer subscribes; an expired card-free trial never charges automatically. The final eligibility increment passed 105 tests, types and conventions, followed by production identity/readiness checks. Live Stripe sandbox payment testing was not established.
• GrowthScout · make invitation and usage handovers clearer. Members can copy an invitation link after sending it; the welcome identifies the inviter and still requires the invited email. The usage panel moved off the dashboard into Organisation → Usage, with remaining-allowance wording replacing a misleading “of zero” display. The final panel release passed 34 tests, types and conventions and live desktop/mobile checks. These are available controls; no actual customer invitation acceptance or website transfer is claimed.
• GrowthScout · repair the production bundle and provider request contract. An authenticated production smoke check exposed a bundle initialisation-order crash. A regression reproduced it before the fix, and the deployed repair restored dashboard loading on desktop/mobile without JavaScript errors. Separately, competitor discovery sent a provider-rejected include_subdomains field, with failed requests misleadingly described as no relevant keywords. Removing that field and retaining safe failure codes passed 68 checks and live provider probes. Its local commit was included in the later deployed revision; production jobs were not replayed, and every historical failure remains unexplained. Hosted Scout CI stayed billing-blocked.
• DOM Studio · deploy the shared designer and merge social-design improvements. The existing VM release path deployed the shared designer, two-way code view and optional Monaco work after the automatic workflow was blocked. Build, 23 editor checks and five SEO checks passed; public health, designer pages and deployed source hashes were verified. Later social-studio PRs merged multi-format resizing, industry templates, reusable style controls and typography. A round-trip fix prevents successive format switches shrinking designs by always resizing from the last edited source. Its PR reports 12 poster tests and repeated-switch browser checks. Those later merges have failed deployment workflows, so they are distinct from the morning’s verified live revision.
• GrowthScout and db3 · narrow article admission without losing retry protection. A local refinement removes the broad transaction and website lock around article preparation. The existing admission transaction instead saves the queued writer and occurrence marker together. Concurrent duplicate tests and a marker-write failure prove that the queue entry, AI request and conversation roll back together, allowing a clean retry. Eighteen tests, types and conventions passed; duplicate credit checks and an extra plan-item save were removed. This work remained uncommitted and undeployed at its handoff, separate from that day’s releases.
• GrowthScout · connect error investigation and preserve diagnostic uncertainty. Sentry authentication was completed and access through its MCP server verified, resolving the previous direct-connector gap. A separate health-scan review retained the unreadable-page hypothesis: blocked crawls can leave records without readable evidence, but the historical cause was never proved. The stage label described a coverage check after persistence, not a failed page write. The diagnostic patch remained uncommitted and undeployed; earlier tests were against an older base. Silence from alerts is not evidence that a weekly scan recovered.
• GrowthScout · shape agency delivery around reusable client knowledge. The recorded product direction connects prospect audits, a shared marketing knowledge workspace, branded reports and version-specific client approval. Client contributions would become both sourced input for Scout and useful positioning, audience, voice and brand documents. A separate pricing review favoured one credit pool only with predictable article quotes or explicit maxima, rather than exposing internal retry costs. Both remain proposals: no new approval workflow, knowledge workspace or unified billing model was implemented.
• db3.ai · propose portable Cloud projects with identifiable releases. The Cloud/Studio direction gives each deployable project a private Git repository, isolated development workspace and database, preview and error reporting. Local editing and optional GitHub remotes would share the same history. Code checkpoints remain separate from secrets, files, database contents and operational records: restoring code cannot restore the database. Every deployment should identify its exact commit. This was a source-informed architecture proposal, not implemented provisioning or a tested Cloud workflow.
• Personal site · draft the Subscription Swap offer. An open PR adds a sales page and savings calculator sharing one offer configuration, with design notes tracking unresolved commercial terms. The draft proposes replacing suitable software subscriptions in exchange for a share of net savings, with a switch-back guarantee. It is not linked from the main navigation. Repository and PR evidence establish a reviewable draft; merge, deployment, accepted customers and realised savings were not established.