September 15, 2026 · the build log
Build log #4: the week phone photos broke grading and Cricut got a workspace
Short, honest week: two apps, a handful of real commits, and one bug that had been quietly poisoning grades. This was mostly plumbing — but the plumbing was load-bearing.
The photo format that was failing grades silently
Life OS grades work with AI. The catch: phones don’t hand you clean images. Modern cameras save HEIC and oddly-oriented JPEGs, and the grading pipeline was choking on them — a photo would come in, the AI would fail, and nothing useful came back. The worst part of a bug like this is that it doesn’t look like a bug from the outside; it looks like the feature just doesn’t work for you.
So this week grading learned to convert phone photos before it tries to read them. Normalize the format first, then grade. It’s the least glamorous kind of fix — no new screen, no new button — but it’s the difference between “the grader is broken” and “the grader works,” and that gap was entirely on the input side. If the source image is wrong, the whole grade is wrong, or absent.
Craft Keeper grew a Cricut workspace
The bigger build lived in Craft Keeper, which got a Cut Studio — a fixed-layout prep workspace aimed squarely at Cricut work, with SVG export at the end of it. The fixed layout matters more than it sounds: cutting machines are unforgiving about placement, and a workspace that reflows on you is a workspace that ruins material. So the layout holds still on purpose, you arrange the cut, and it exports the SVG the machine actually wants.
The second Cut Studio commit is the kind of access fix I keep having to make across apps: you can now reach Cut Studio from a member login too, not just whatever privileged path it started behind. Building a feature and then locking it to the one account you tested with is a trap I fall into constantly — the thing works, but only for me, which is the same as it not working. Now a regular member login lands in the same door.
The honest part
No dramatic confessions this week — the interesting bug (HEIC grading) was the confession. Beyond the shippable commits above, both repos carried the usual pile of scaffolding: refactors, config, the unglamorous plumbing that doesn’t earn its own paragraph but has to exist before any of the above can ship. I’d rather tell you that plainly than dress up a chore commit as a feature.
If there’s a theme across both apps, it’s inputs and access: grading failed on the input format, Cut Studio failed on who could get in. Neither was about the clever core of the feature — both were about the edges where a real person actually meets the app. Phones save weird files. Members log in with member accounts. The app has to meet reality where it is, not where the demo was.
What’s next
Cut Studio has the workspace and the export; the next question is whether the SVG survives contact with an actual machine and actual material — which means shooting it, feeding that footage back to the coverage board from last week, and seeing whether Craft Keeper’s cell goes dark-to-filled. The daily version still lives at Rndm Life Things.
— Tristan, Family Flow LLC