# I audited my own product and found it never actually worked for its own core use case

> Source: <https://dev.to/nirmeet_trivedi_07bf0d38f/i-audited-my-own-product-and-found-it-never-actually-worked-for-its-own-core-use-case-498l>
> Published: 2026-09-12 04:57:22+00:00

I built [Meanwhile](https://trymeanwhile.online), a status line for Claude Code, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. Most of the time it shows a quiet tip. Sometimes it shows a clearly-labeled "(sponsored)" line instead, and when that happens half of what the sponsor paid goes back to the developer.

This week I actually sat down and audited my own code end to end instead of just checking install counts. What I found wasn't great: the VS Code extension had been silently broken for the exact use case it exists for, since the day it shipped.

``` js
const ACTIVITY_FRESHNESS_MS = 30_000;

const poll = async () => {
  const windowFocused = vscode.window.state.focused;
  const recentlyActive = Date.now() - lastActivityAt < ACTIVITY_FRESHNESS_MS;
  if (!windowFocused || !recentlyActive) return;
  // ...fetch and bill a line...
};
```

`lastActivityAt` only updated on a real document edit. The moment you fire off an agent and take your hands off the keyboard to let it think, `recentlyActive` goes false within 30 seconds and the extension goes completely dark. That's the exact window the whole product exists to monetize.

Fix: track presence more broadly (tab switches, cursor movement, regaining window focus, not just edits), and widen the window to 5 minutes to actually match how long an agent turn runs.

Independently, the server had its own gate:

```
function sessionProgressed(baseline, current) {
  if (!baseline) return true;
  if (current.tokens !== null && baseline.tokens !== null && current.tokens > baseline.tokens) return true;
  // ...
  return false;
}
```

For VS Code, `tokens` is mapped to the editor's own edit count. Requiring it to strictly increase makes sense for Claude Code (a real session's cost/tokens always climb turn over turn) but is exactly backwards for VS Code: edit count is *supposed* to plateau while you're waiting on an agent. So even after fixing bug 1, a genuinely live poll during a wait still got silently discarded as "looks like a faked ping."

Two independent bugs, stacked, both silently killing the same use case. Fixed by trusting a live poll within the same session (matched by session ID) instead of requiring a number that has no reason to move.

Copilot CLI's hook payload never sends cost or token data at all, just a `session_id` — and unlike Claude Code, that id doesn't change per turn, it's scoped to the whole CLI session. The server's fallback logic assumed a changing session id was the signal of real progression. Since Copilot's never changes within a session, every turn after the first billed $0, silently, for as long as the extension has existed.

Also found and fixed while in there:

`/network-stats` was doing a full sequential KV scan (600+ reads) on every request — replaced with a self-seeding Durable Object counter, now O(1)
None of this is retroactive marketing spin — if you installed the VS Code extension before this week and it felt dead, that was real, not you. It's fixed now (0.1.7, live on Open VSX).

I don't have big usage numbers to show off here. What I have is a real list of specific, embarrassing bugs, found by actually reading the code instead of trusting a dashboard, and fixed. If that's useful to anyone auditing their own "is this actually doing what I think it's doing" assumptions, that's the whole point of writing this up.