589 "installs" turned out to be ~0 real ones -- here's what I learned checking

Meanwhile's live /network-stats page showed 589 installs and I nearly celebrated that at face value. Pulled every single record from production KV instead of trusting the counter: 93% matched an exact synthetic fingerprint (fixed cost, fixed tokens, sequential fake session IDs) from my own earlier testing, and most of the rest were test-labeled names hitting from different simulated clients. Real, verified external human installs: as close to 0 as makes no difference.

The counter itself wasn't buggy -- it counts every install: key exactly as designed. The actual mistake was upstream: real curl/script calls hit production instead of wrangler dev --local during earlier testing, and nobody audited the data until now.

Posting this because it felt more useful to say plainly than to quietly reset the number and move on. If you're checking your own growth metrics and haven't pulled the raw records at least once, it's worth doing before you trust the dashboard.