| # Agent trace — Mystery-Mail Guardian (PUBLISHED 2026-06-12, owner-approved) |
|
|
| > **Status: PUBLISHED** with owner consent to |
| > [build-small-hackathon/mystery-mail-guardian-agent-trace](https://huggingface.co/datasets/build-small-hackathon/mystery-mail-guardian-agent-trace). |
| > `achievement:sharing` tag added to README. The published dataset card lives |
| > in `dist/agent-trace/README.md`; this file is the working draft it was built |
| > from. Sanitization was re-verified by automated secret scan before upload. |
|
|
| ## What this is |
|
|
| Mystery-Mail Guardian was built end-to-end with Claude Code (Anthropic) as the |
| hands and a human owner as the director. This trace is the honest, sanitized |
| record of how that collaboration actually worked — the prompts that steered it, |
| the loop that ran it, and the evidence trail it left behind. |
|
|
| ## How the build was driven |
|
|
| - **Planning first:** every major phase started as a written plan |
| (`docs/superpowers/plans/`) with TDD steps, verified against live docs |
| rather than model memory (Gradio 6 API drift caught this way twice). |
| - **The owner steered with short prompts**, e.g.: |
| - "the loading icon is broken … I provided this image and it gave this |
| output which I think is wrong" → led to the prompt-echo discovery (the |
| 1.3B model parroting our JSON schema back) and the single-overlay loader. |
| - "make an Easter egg when the user switches to Japanese" → the Gen X Soft |
| Club palette, held to the same WCAG-AA tests as the main themes. |
| - "train the model more using our Modal credits" → answered with evidence |
| instead of obedience: a labeled synthetic-letter dataset + eval matrix |
| that showed safety behavior was already at ceiling, so no fine-tune |
| shipped — the data made the call. |
| - "enter a state of loop-craft … keep improving until June 14" → a |
| self-rescheduling build loop with a committed worklist |
| (`docs/loop-worklist.md`), one verified iteration per wake. |
| - **Every iteration had the same gate:** offline tests green → Modal GPU |
| validation where behavior changed → deploy → live probes against the |
| running Space → commit with evidence. |
| |
| ## What the trace shows (highlights) |
|
|
| 1. **Live fire beats simulation.** Three JSON-repair bugs and one genuinely |
| unsafe model suggestion ("check with the tax bureau and ensure you pay |
| soon") were caught on the deployed Space; the safety layer discarded the |
| bad advice by construction (BUILD_LOG 06-11). |
| 2. **The QA harness caught real bugs on its first runs.** Run #1 of the Modal |
| matrix found a scammer's reply address leaking through key facts; the |
| multilingual eval found Devanagari/Japanese scam letters under-flagged. |
| Both fixed, gated, and redeployed the same day (BUILD_LOG 06-12). |
| 3. **A NO-GO gate did its job.** A prompt improvement regressed one Spanish |
| case ("within a set time" paraphrase); the deploy was blocked until the |
| urgency heuristic was generalized with tests, then re-gated to GO. |
| 4. **Tooling archaeology, documented:** `launch(js=)` dead in Gradio 6.17.3, |
| js-only `demo.load` registered-but-never-run, `head=` dropped by Space |
| SSR — resolved with `head=` + `ssr_mode=False` (BUILD_LOG 06-12). |
| |
| ## Companion artifacts (already public in the repo) |
| |
| - `BUILD_LOG.md` — the full field notes, including dead ends |
| - `docs/modal-validation-report.json`, `docs/modal-eval-report.json` — GPU |
| evidence as committed JSON |
| - `docs/loop-worklist.md` — the autonomous loop's rules and backlog, as run |
| - Git history — every step, with co-authorship trailers |
|
|
| ## Sanitization checklist (verify before publishing) |
|
|
| - [x] No API keys, tokens, or secret values (HF token lives only in the local |
| cache + a Modal secret; never in the repo) |
| - [x] No real personal data — every letter in datasets/examples is synthetic; |
| phone numbers use the reserved 555-01XX range |
| - [x] No private URLs or credentials in logs quoted here |
| - [x] Owner approved publication (chat, 2026-06-12) |
| - [x] `achievement:sharing` tag added to README after upload |
| |
