I made chat worse. Here's how we fixed it..

I install every new build on my own phone before anyone else sees it. On October 3rd I installed one and wrote this: it sounds like a robot, and the button doesn't say stop. Chat had become colder and, oddly, blind. I'd done that, and it took four separate problems to explain it.

The four causes

1. A new, unreleased feature on my build was matching too eagerly, and it was taking web search away from some questions. Ask what's new today and it answered from my own data, then apologized.
2. A new central “voice” for chat had lost the warmth the earlier one had.
3. A message I'd just sent could hide behind the keyboard box.
4. On a follow-up message, there was no Stop button.

How we found them

I could have guessed. Instead, we replayed my real conversations against the version that had been working, and compared the answers side by side. That's what separated the problems that were real from the ones that only looked real. The new voice was switched on and off again the same night while we sorted it out.

What stayed back

A larger project to give Neeos one consistent writing style, with dials for tone, length, and emoji, had won a blind comparison on October 2nd. After this, I held it back until it passes the same replay of my real conversations. A test that wins on the examples I picked proves less than one that works on what I actually said.

None of this reached the public app. That's the reason I run a separate build for myself: I want to be the one who finds these.

Written October 21, 2026 from the build log, and dated to when this happened.