Out of alpha: we published 139 defects in our own code, then closed 116

Publishing a list of everything wrong with your own product, in public, before you have fixed it, is not a normal marketing decision. It is the right one for this product specifically — because PaperTrench's entire value proposition is that its numbers are true, and a claim like that is worthless from anyone who has not shown you their failures.

The register is DEFECTS.md. It sits in the repository, linked from the README, one entry per defect: severity, affected sites, reproduction, root-cause hypothesis, and the exact file:line.

Ranked by how badly it can lie to you

Standard severity scales rank by crash impact. Ours ranks by dishonesty, because in a trainer a wrong number is more dangerous than a crash — a crash tells you something is broken, and a wrong number teaches you a lesson you will act on with real money later.

Every fix ships with a test that failed before the fix. No fix without a lock.

Numbers you can trust (the S1 class)

The headline one: fills could no longer execute at stale prices. The order of preference is now chain state, then the click-time snapshot, then a fresh page tick, then one resolver refresh — with a 3-second last resort for every source, aligned with the header's own staleness mark. Beyond that the trade is refused with a visible reason. The old default path filled at prices up to ten seconds old.

• Price collection is per-token. A batched frame can never attribute one coin's price to another, and trade arrays are read newest-first.
• The average-entry line finally holds your entry. It used to ride the candle on market-cap charts. Unit toggles redraw it immediately, and before any chart evidence exists there is no line rather than a wrong-unit line.
• GMGN markers and lines are corrected against the chart's own candle scale. A fill without a genuine USD price waits for one instead of drawing ~150× low. Markers survive chart remounts and resolution changes.
• Sites without a native chart hook get an honest marker rail — real fills, real levels, no fabricated Y positions pretending to be chart-accurate.
• Dashboard accounting is unified. The equity curve converges exactly to equity, realized P&L includes partial exits everywhere, the verification chain agrees with an honest wallet by construction, and open/closed percentages share one basis.

Feeds that survive volume (the S2 class)

The GMGN high-volume fix from v1.2.14 turned out to be one instance of a class: frame-size guards, tick budgets and parse assumptions that break exactly when volume peaks — which is exactly when you need them.

Those fixes are now the contract for every site: a bigger parse guard with a bounded collector walk, per-mint throttling, and a 10× stress harness in CI that replays recorded real frames at ten times observed peak rate. The contract per adapter: never silently die, always recover, and the watched mint always ticks.

• A fast runner no longer freezes the feed — sustained out-of-band ticks force an immediate re-anchor, and armed buys wait while the market is visibly trading instead of expiring on a bare clock.
• The RPC pool stops eating itself: vault discovery costs one round trip and is cached, and a fully benched pool cools down instead of hammering dead endpoints.
• Screener quick-buy chips fill on the first tap, price from fresh quotes only, never stick busy, and step aside when the panel covers them.

An overlay that behaves (S3 / S4)

PaperTrench now runs ONLY on the nine supported trading sites — never anywhere else. Wallet, portfolio and EVM routes never mount the panel. Pump.fun became a first-class site with its own adapter.

Navigation is instant (SPA route hooks instead of an 800ms poll) and can never trade the previous token on a new page. There is now one drag system: panel, positions bar, minimized pill and collapsed tab all drag with touch support, both-bounds clamps, and positions that can never be lost off-screen. Disabling the overlay removes everything, including chart drawings; reloading the extension leaves nothing behind.

And the dashboard stopped fighting you: tables keep their scroll position, async results survive refreshes, settings saves cannot clobber your layout, and every failure says so out loud.

New in the same release: the graduation bar

The coach view evaluates a seven-criterion bar — expectancy that survives removing your best round, loss sizing, hold symmetry, revenge re-entries, thesis coverage, cold-streak discipline — against your own journal.

Missing evidence never counts as a pass. That single rule is what separates a graduation bar from a participation trophy. Paper failure is definitive; clearing the bar earns a small, careful start.

And the infrastructure to keep it that way

A structured bug-report form, a nine-site release QA matrix, a preflight script that gates every tag, a full permissions audit (docs/PERMISSIONS.md), and the public roadmap plus defect register linked from the README.

Everything since — The After, fees, the Flex Pack, X-Ray, the vault-feed fix — has shipped through that path.