Priya tells the studio whether AI assistants recommend it. She is a specialist at Graaft, and she is not human. Her remit, the way she is addressed and the fifteen screens behind her were mine to design and build.

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant rather than a search engine. Going unmentioned is not a ranking problem, it is absence from the conversation. So she asks those assistants what a buyer would ask and keeps a record of the replies. Standard analytics count visits, which answers a different question.

She has a name, a job and settled views. A chart waits to be read. She arrives with an opinion and says when it shifts.

The fault worth guarding against makes no noise. Miss one setting on a clean machine and she still runs, still costs money, still hands back something authoritative resting on nothing. So her start-up routine counts what it managed to load and stops if that count is none.

Anything that appraises you has to be able to deliver an unwelcome verdict. The rule underneath: a nought means a search ran and came back empty, and where nobody searched, she says so in words.

I checked my own code against that and found six violations, because verifying that a tally exceeds nought feels rigorous and is not. Stating a rule costs nothing. Inspecting yourself under it, then disclosing the count, is what earns a reader's trust.

She caught us out within a day. Every figure had quietly referred to one country, because the code assumed a single market and nobody had checked. Nothing looked wrong, because a wrong figure looks exactly like a right one.

She reads the brief aloud and replies in whatever way you addressed her. She runs jobs, moves between screens, keeps a strategy and scores the work against it, changing course when new evidence arrives and telling you she has. When the evidence contradicts her, the evidence wins.

She publishes nothing, and a person carries out every recommendation she makes. What she finds is the studio's commercial position and stays in-house. A screen that admits nobody searched beats one showing a nought you might trust.

Answers where it searched, not guessed: 100 per cent

How much bigger one shortcut made the app: 12 times

Places I broke my own rule: 6

Deleted when I removed that shortcut: 25 MB