✅ Building Zoye, Part 5 - The First Real Feedback

The most useful feedback we got early on wasn't about a feature. It was about trust.

We put the rough version in front of a small group of real users. We expected the notes to be about what was missing. Some were. But the ones that actually stung were about something else entirely, and they all rhymed: I'm not sure it did what it said it did.

That's a brutal thing to hear about a product whose entire promise is that it does the work for you. And they were right. The thing would report success in a way that felt confident, and sometimes the underlying action hadn't fully happened, or had happened differently than described. To the user, that's indistinguishable from lying.

We understood something there that shaped everything after. When software just stores your data, a bug is annoying. When software acts on your behalf, a bug is a betrayal. The bar is completely different. If you're going to let something touch your business, it has to be more honest about its own failures than most software ever needs to be.

That's when "never falsely confirm something that didn't happen" stopped being a nice principle and became a rule we build against.

My question to you would be: Has an agent ever told you it did something it hadn't done? What did that cost you?