Build log
Notes from the bench — what broke, what I changed, and why.
Thirteen hours, no error
A security fix I'd reported as a win quietly killed my daily puzzle generation, and it left no trace anywhere — finding out why made me measure what my multi-zone architecture actually costs.
One column was doing four jobs
Cutting Puzzle Lab's daily from 30 boards to 6 meant one database column stopped meaning what it used to — and a safety net I'd relied on quietly stopped catching anything.
There's no such thing as a hard 4×4 Killer Sudoku
Shrinking Puzzle Lab's daily from 30 boards to 6 meant building a tiny Killer Sudoku — and measuring 16,000 of them showed the difficulty lever I rely on at 9×9 has nothing to push against at 4×4.
KSudoku exposes two difficulty knobs — one of them does nothing
Building Killer Sudoku generation, I reached for KSudoku's cage difficulty parameters and found one of the two was dead code — which is why Puzzle Lab grades by technique instead of by a knob.