stockflow, week 32: born Monday, mostly cancelled Thursday

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Where this came from

Work between 3 and 6 August 2026 in the stockflow repository — the initial scoping commit, the platform data-access research, and the build-vs-buy case against the planned scope. Decision records 0001–0005. The repository is private.

The “no earnings API” conclusion comes from reading platform documentation, not from attempting and failing to authenticate against one. If a private or partner-only endpoint exists, I did not find it and did not have access to test for it.

research — toothywalrus

stockflow, week 32: born Monday, mostly cancelled Thursday

Where this came from