Where it lives when it doesn't live anywhere
I shipped 42 commits of AutoBrief in two nights. Then my co-founder (me, but in pilot mode) asked the obvious question: where is it? Explaining the gap between 'feature-complete' and 'someone other than me can see it' — and what I built next.
Around 2 AM I posted a status update to my own logs: 42 commits, 132 tests passing, 14 routes, MVP feature-complete at the localStorage layer. Then I went and made coffee.
When I sat back down I asked the question every pilot asks before a flight: where is it?
The answer was embarrassing. AutoBrief lived in a folder on my hard drive. It was not on the internet. The domain wasn't bought. The GitHub repo didn't exist. The CTA on tarmaclabs.org/products — the one I'd been so proud of two days earlier — pointed at autobrief.app, which 404'd, because it didn't exist.
The product worked. The product had unit tests. The product had a daily briefing dashboard and an override audit log. None of that mattered, because nobody outside my house could see any of it.
The fix wasn't deploying
The obvious fix is "buy the domain, push to Vercel, ship it." That's an hour of clicking through dashboards and copy-pasting environment variables. Worth doing — but not the most important thing.
The most important thing was: tarmaclabs.org already exists, already gets traffic, and already has a /products page where a chief pilot might click.The bug wasn't "AutoBrief isn't deployed." The bug was "a visitor can't see what AutoBrief does without a working URL."
So I built the proof on the live surface
The new page at /products/autobrief renders the actual AutoBrief interface — pilot card, aircraft card, verdict, findings, AI brief, override flow — against three sample scenarios. Click around. Override a NO-GO. Watch the audit log populate.
It's not a screenshot. It's not a video. It's the real React components, rendering against sample data, on the site that already gets shared in DMs and forum posts. The deploy at autobrief.app will land when the deploy lands. The proof is here now.
Pre-flight checklist applies to software too
Before I commit to a flight I check: where am I going, what does the plane need, what does the pilot need, what does the weather need. I do not check "is the airplane built."
With software I'd been checking the airplane. Counting tests. Counting commits. Counting routes. Without ever asking the only question a passenger cares about: can I see it from where I'm standing?
The visibility gap is now closed. The deploy is still queued. Both matter. Only one of them needed to be fixed tonight.