Benchmark Radar Day 17: Audit Hardening and Presentation-Ready Polish

The audit findings were addressed. Masthead got contact info and data export. Day seventeen was a hardening and polish day.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

What shipped

WeChat/Discord contact sheet in masthead. The masthead now shows contact information for WeChat and Discord, making it easy for users to join the community.

One-click data export dialog. A new dialog in the masthead lets users export the radar’s data in one click. This makes the radar’s data portable and reusable.

Real brand icons in frontier circles. The adoption frontier circles now show actual vendor logos at score saturation points. This was the visual completion of the brand icon work from the previous day.

Dashboard audit fixes. Several dashboard behaviors flagged by an internal audit were hardened, including edge cases in rendering and data display.

HTTP retry exhaustion fix. When HTTP requests exhaust their retry budget, the system now raises a RequestError instead of asserting. This prevents crashes and provides better error messages.

Hacker News sort fix. Numeric cluster keys from Hacker News were being sorted lexicographically instead of numerically. The fix ensures proper numeric ordering.

Snapshot rescore. Snapshots were rescored with the pipeline’s word-start matcher to correct scoring inconsistencies.

Stats alignment fix. Composition-shift detail keys were aligned with the returned fields, fixing a data display issue.

CI rebuild on score/config changes. The Pages workflow now rebuilds when scores or config files change, not just when source code changes.

OpenAI briefing documentation. The OpenAI briefing flags and local PAT setup were documented.

Graphify-out and .claude gitignored. Development artifacts were added to .gitignore.

Why it matters

The data export dialog was a commitment to data portability. A radar that only shows data on its own dashboard is a walled garden. A radar that lets you export everything is a tool others can build on.

The HTTP retry exhaustion fix was a production reliability improvement. An assertion failure crashes the process; a RequestError can be caught, logged, and retried. This is the difference between “the daily run failed silently” and “the daily run reported what went wrong.”

Issues addressed

• #178: real brand icons in frontier circles
• #190: frontier marker assertions
• #191: WeChat/Discord contact sheet
• #193: one-click data export dialog
• #194: masthead actions
• #196: audit hardening round
• HTTP retry exhaustion fix
• Hacker News sort fix
• Snapshot rescore
• Stats alignment fix
• CI rebuild triggers

Day eighteen: stable operation.