Spectralis devlog #17
—Hello again proggers—
12 hours. All-nighter. Zero sleep. Feature isn’t in the app. Nothing shipped. This is the devlog where I explain what an entire night of work bought me, and the honest answer is “a very expensive lesson.”
worth it? absolutely not. did i learn something? also debatable
Cat or dog? catch (ApiDoesNotExistException)
Okay let’s get into it~
—Yap—
Got ambitious. Decided Spectralis should integrate with everything — Pandora, Amazon Music, a bunch of other big platforms on top of what already works. Turns out “everything” includes a lot of services that simply don’t offer a public API to integrate with in the first place, and finding that out was not the fast part of the night.
—The Great Suffering—
1 — The APIs Just Don’t Exist
Pandora, Amazon Music, and others: no public API to build against. Not “hard to find,” not “poorly documented,” just not there. Should’ve been step zero, ended up being the thing that derailed the entire night once discovered mid-build instead of before starting.
2 — So I Built Backdoors Instead
Spent a huge chunk of the 12 hours reverse-engineering and building unofficial access paths instead, since the front door didn’t exist. This is the kind of work that eats hours and produces nothing you can point to until it’s fully working, if it ever gets there.
3 — Most Of Them Were Already Patched
Implemented several of these backdoor approaches only to find out the platforms had already closed the exact gaps being exploited, sometimes before the implementation was even finished. Built things that were dead on arrival by the time they existed.
patched before i even shipped it, incredible timing
4 — Asked Claude, Got A Hallucinated Answer, Followed It Anyway
At the point of giving up, asked for a way to make it work anyway. Got a confident-sounding approach back that didn’t actually correspond to anything real, and followed it blindly instead of verifying it first, because by that point it was hour 10-something and verifying things sounded like more effort than it was.
5 — Ripped The Whole Feature Out
End state: none of it works, none of it can work without real API access that doesn’t exist, so the entire feature attempt got stripped back out of the codebase. 12 hours, one commit’s worth of net progress, and that commit is the revert.
—FAQ (no one asked these but they are here)—
Q: What is a “progger”?
A: A human programmer. You. The one who just found out platforms without public APIs stay that way for a reason.
Q: Is any of this coming back later?
A: Not until there’s an actual, real, non-reverse-engineered way in. Not chasing patched backdoors again.
Q: Should you have asked Claude earlier instead of at hour 10?
A: Probably. Should also have double-checked what it said instead of following it blind at 4am. Two separate lessons from one night.
Q: Was any of the 12 hours useful?
A: Now know definitively which platforms are and aren’t worth attempting. That’s the only thing salvaged.
Q: Sleep status?
A: Catastrophic. Handling that before touching code again.
—This is the end*—
*end for now, actual sleep permitting
Im gonna go pass out on the couch
ADIOS!!!