A retrospective on 150 autonomous iters of the Wishdeal Factory buyer-path loop. What got built, what broke, and the patterns that turned out to matter.
The 150 iters broke into four roughly distinct phases:
| Phase | Iters | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Per-surface audit buildout | ~100-123 | 17 per-surface content audits (one per buyer-touching page type) |
| Cross-cutting audit buildout | ~124-145 | 25 cross-cutting audits (naming, structured data, meta, accessibility) |
| Fix-work pivot | ~134-148 | 96.7% placeholder-CTA reduction, 1,860 a11y page mods |
| Source-durability hardening | 148-150 | Drift sweeps, source-fix discipline, cron guard-rails |
When an audit surfaces N similar issues, build a safe-match table and inject the fix in one sweep. Demonstrated at scale:
Surface-fix injectors don't survive cron cycles. The source generators that own the affected element will re-overwrite the fix the next time they run. Iter 148 discovered this when 39 nav-role fixes had been reverted over 4 days.
An audit that flags false positives is worse than no audit. Three precision refinements documented:
find_meta was truncating values at the first apostrophe (e.g., "You're billing 40 hours" became just "You"). Split-pattern fix for quote-aware capture.<div class="prob-icon">📋</div>. Refined to strip *-icon wrappers before scanning.r"^name:\\s+(.+?)\\s*$" (double-backslash, matching literal \s chars). Fixed.When semantic markup is wrong but visual is acceptable, ARIA overrides preserve visual layout while satisfying accessibility tools:
<h1> → <h2> (would shrink visual), added role="heading" aria-level="2" to 178 secondary H1s| Class | Count | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog-wide | 1 | fakeproof (no live-customer claims) |
| Per-surface content | 17 | FAQ, vs, pricing, sales-kit, case-studies, etc |
| Cross-cutting | 31 | cross-surface-name, JSON-LD coverage, WCAG accessibility (7 criteria), readability F-K grade |
| Lint | 1 | em-dash sweep |
These are Wes-tasks - the audit surfaces them clearly on the quality report.
The Wishdeal Factory catalog has 246 scored products with 247 build pages, each verified across 50 audit dimensions. WCAG coverage spans 7 success criteria uniformly. The buyer's experience - from catalog scan, to product page, through pricing/FAQ/comparison, to unlock/adopt CTAs - is consistent at the structural, semantic, and editorial levels.
The audit suite plus 13 source-patched generators plus 7 hourly guard-rail injectors makes the catalog self-healing for the dimensions we've enumerated. Drift will still occur, but it gets surfaced in the next audit cycle.
What comes after iter 150 depends on direction: more audits add diminishing returns. More fix-work tackles the warn-state items. Content investment (new essays, new products) extends the catalog. The audit infrastructure is now stable enough to support any of those directions.