Field Notes
Dispatches from building Diffusitron: how we handle trust and safety, the economics under the hood, and what building with AI agents in the loop is actually like.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
App Check Doesn't Have a Dashboard
Firebase App Check has no dashboard for Cloud Functions. Here's how we read its readiness signal out of Cloud Logging, and how we knew it was safe to enforce before flipping the switch.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
Free Tokens Are a Handshake
A run of fooN@gmail.com signups taught us to recognize a returning identity at signup, so a starter grant gets claimed once per person instead of once per fresh Gmail address.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
Trust Is Additive
Protecting a grant at signup is only half the problem. A small trust score, built from cheap signals we already have, keeps a legitimate account's usage healthy without punishing real users.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
Trust Is a Budget
As a gate, App Check never caught a faker for us. The per-user Wilson trust score it threw off became the thing that tells us which accounts have earned more rope.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
Observe Before You Enforce
The discipline behind every control in the series: ship it dormant, watch it run against real traffic without acting, and only then turn it on.
Field Notes · Trust & Safety
Paying for Taste
How we reward people for liking each other's work with real in-app currency, on both sides of the heart, without turning the feed into an engagement farm.