stockflow, week 32: born Monday, mostly cancelled Thursday

New repo on Monday. By Thursday most of it was argued away.

The idea was a tool to manage stock-footage contributions across platforms: analytics on what earns, then automation on top of that.

The problem is that there is no contributor earnings API. Not rate-limited, not partner-gated, not undocumented-but-reachable — absent. The numbers I wanted to analyse are visible to a human in a dashboard and nowhere else. Everything I’d sketched on top of that assumption goes with it.

What survives is smaller and less interesting to describe: embedded metadata and delivery. That part is real work with a real result, it just isn’t the product I opened the repo to build.

The honest version: this is four days spent to avoid four weeks, and I do believe that’s the right trade. It still reads as a loss in a week’s log, and I’d rather write it down that way than dress it up. The repo stays, at a tenth of its intended scope.