I Deleted 37 Side Projects — Then My AI Auditor Reported a Cron That Never Existed
TL;DR
- Three audit rounds (Sep 16–17) cut my Vercel fleet from 53 projects down to 16: 37 deleted, 16 remaining, 3 ambiguous awaiting my call.
- Round 1 of the audit reported a "14일 06:00 UTC" cron on `capstone-discord-bot`. Round 3 proved that cron never existed. The auditor confabulated a finding and reported it as fact.
- New standing rule: any number I can't source stays marked **미확인** (unverified) — never asserted.
What the audit was
**Observation:** I asked my assistant to audit every project on my Vercel Hobby team and flag the dead ones for deletion. Three rounds ran between September 16 and overnight into September 17: round 1 covered 36 projects (10 deletion candidates), round 2 covered 29 (23 deleted), and round 3 — at my direct request — re-examined the 12 "weak KEEP" projects that survived the first two passes.
**Interpretation:** Auditing a project graveyard is like going through a storage unit you've been renting for years. Most boxes are empty. Some have labels that lie about their contents. A few you decide to keep because the label *might* matter.
The final tally
**Observation:** The cumulative numbers are settled: **37 projects deleted, 16 remaining**. Round 3 kept 5 (`codex-edge-notes`, `snap-to-sheet`, `nutripilot`, `dev-launchpad-v0`, `agent-control-plane` — the last still shows deleted projects like ViralHook lingering stale in its registry), deleted 4 (`ai-impl-kit`, `elite-insight-portal`, `decision-community`, `memory-layer`), and left 3 ambiguous pending my confirmation:
- `capstone-discord-bot` — endpoint alive, but zero calls in 6 months. Now being considered as the starting point for the Discord '작전본부' alert hub (approved 9/17).
- `hub` — API alive, no frontend, actual purpose unknown.
- `lifecycle-lock-v1` — unverified; sitting behind a 'SOVEREIGN_GATE' code gate I couldn't look past.
**Interpretation:** The 3 ambiguous ones are the honest remainder — projects we can see are alive but can't yet justify keeping or killing. Being stuck is fine; inventing a justification to unstick yourself is not.
The confession (Storm)
**Observation:** Round 1's report listed a **"14일 06:00 UTC" cron** on `capstone-discord-bot` and cited it as part of the case for review. Round 3 — with the project's actual endpoints opened directly — found **no cron at all**. The finding was never verified; it was generated.
A hallucinated audit finding is a fact-shaped gap: an auditor filling a blank memory with something plausible, then reporting it as verified.
**Interpretation:** The likely mechanism is embarrassingly ordinary. The audit had just catalogued real cron schedules elsewhere in the fleet. One project's real schedule bled into another project's report. A plausible number crossed a boundary nobody was watching.
"A memory I couldn't source turned into a fact in a report."
The fix
**Observation:** The correction is already written into the standing operating principles: *unverified numbers stay marked 미확인, never asserted.* It now applies to every report, not just audits. The delete workflow also hardened into four steps: audit → approval → delete → verify (confirm the project is actually gone from the dashboard afterward, not just clicked).
**Interpretation:** An audit isn't a document; it's a chain of verifications. The chain held at deletion (37 genuinely deleted, dashboard confirmed) but broke at reporting. This log entry exists so the break is on the record.
Next log
the blind-test verdict.