Limits

Knowing where a tool stops is part of using it well.

  1. Evidence
  2. Scouting
  3. Engine
  4. Platform

Evidence

  • Public text is biased. Forums and review sites over-represent developers, larger companies and loud complaints. Many paying customers never post anything.
  • Scores 1 and 2 are leads, not demand. Online scouting rarely reaches evidence 3; 4 and 5 need conversations, pre-sales or proof of an existing spend.
  • Paraphrase loses nuance. Signals store one paraphrased sentence and at most one short quote, by design. Open the ref before acting on a signal.

Scouting

  • Not reproducible. Web search and fetch results vary by region, day and the tools’ own limits. Two runs with the same focus will differ.
  • A handful of pages per run. Each scout reads a few pages and returns at most eight candidates. This is sampling, not market research at scale.
  • Some sites refuse automated fetches. The scouts can still report a search result they saw, marked as such, but cannot read the page behind it.
  • No personal data. Scouts record businesses and public roles only. Leads that only exist as private individuals are dropped.

Engine

  • Fixed limits. 100 € per experiment, 14 days per experiment and three validating ideas are constants (MAX_BUDGET_EUR, MAX_EXPERIMENT_DAYS in scripts/ideaengine/schema.py, MAX_VALIDATING in workspace.py), not settings. Budgets are in euros.
  • A small YAML subset. Flat keys, inline lists and block lists. Nested maps and multi-line block values are rejected with an error that names the file, rather than half-parsed. Anchors, aliases and flow maps ({k: v}) are not interpreted: they are kept as plain text.
  • Shell writes skip the per-write check. Records written through Bash are only checked by the Stop hook and by engine.py check.
  • One workspace, one person. There is no locking or merge logic beyond git.

Platform

  • Claude Code 2.1.295 or later for scouting, skills and hooks (the hooks use its onFailure setting; this release was tested with 2.1.310). The engine and the records work without it.
  • Python 3.10 or newer as python3. If python3 is missing or older, the engine cannot start: the installer warns, the PreToolUse hook blocks every Write and Edit in the workspace, and the other hooks show a hook error notice.
  • macOS and Linux. On Windows, use WSL.