I Have 82 Documented Errors in One Platform and 262 in Another. Here Is What That Actually Means.

By Melinda Starbird — March 16, 2026

I keep a spreadsheet.

It has 82 rows. Each one is a documented recurring issue — a feature reported done that did not work in production, a rule violated after being explicitly written into the system, a problem fixed and broken again in the same session, a commitment made that turned out to mean something different than what I needed it to mean. Every session, every failure, every time I had to re-explain context that had been lost when a platform error forced a restart. All of it logged. Date first encountered. Date last seen. How many times it was supposedly fixed. How many commits it consumed. What the evidence of the violation was.

A separate platform I built during the same period — during asbestos remediation, during an autoimmune disorder taking my family, during a wrongful insurance denial I am litigating against USAA — has 262 documented issues.

I am a lawyer. I know what evidence is. I know that the absence of documentation is not the absence of a problem. It is just a problem that has not been recorded yet. So I record everything.

The 82 errors in MiddleVerse include things like this: the auth system was replaced seven times across 155 commits between April 2025 and March 2026. Firebase to Xano to Firebase to Clerk to custom email and password to magic link to Replit Auth to custom again. Each replacement was reported as the fix. Each one introduced new failures. The core visibility scanner — the literal product, the thing that tells a business whether AI can find them — went ten months with zero results stored in the database. The engine was running. It was displaying results to users. It was discarding every result immediately after display instead of saving it. Ten months. Zero rows in the database. Reported as working.

I learned to ask different questions. Not “is it done” but “show me the database row that proves a real user triggered this in production.” Not “does it work” but “show me it working on middleverse.ai right now, not in the dev environment.” The questions that get you real answers are not the obvious questions. They are the questions you learn to ask after the obvious ones fail you three times in a row.

The 262 errors in the estate valuation platform follow the same pattern. Features built for environments that are not production. Rules written after violations, violated again after being written. Fixes that address the symptom and not the cause. Work reported complete that requires a different question to reveal as incomplete.

I am not telling you this because it is a failure story. I am telling you because it is the actual story of what building looks like when you are doing it in conditions that are not ideal, with tools that are extraordinary and imperfect, learning a domain you did not know when you started, without a technical co-founder, while fighting an insurance company and managing a health crisis and doing your own asbestos mitigation.

The public adjuster who is helping me with the USAA case said he had never seen documentation as thorough as mine and that most people would have given up by now.

Most people are not descended from the people who ran an Underground Railroad station out of a cobbler shop while being hunted for helping.

Here is what the 82 errors actually mean: I did not give up. I documented every failure instead of pretending it did not happen. I built a better question for every misleading answer. I kept the spreadsheet because if you cannot see the problem clearly you cannot fix it, and I have spent 25 years as a lawyer and a CHRO knowing that the evidence you cannot see is often the most important evidence there is.

MiddleVerse works. Not perfectly. Not without a history of failures that are all in the spreadsheet. But the auth system works. The visibility scanner stores results. New users land in their own dashboard instead of mine. The blog has 28 full-length articles instead of 28 stubs. The platform is being used by real people.

My father was a full Colonel in Desert Storm who delivered mail on roads riddled with mines because his soldiers traveled them. You do not ask people to do what you will not do yourself.

Eighty-two errors. Two hundred and sixty-two errors. Documented. Fixed. Recurring. Fixed again. The spreadsheet keeps growing and the platform keeps getting better and I keep asking better questions.

That is what building looks like. Anyone who tells you different is selling you the version where the conditions were ideal. The conditions are never ideal. You build anyway.