2026-03-23 — Dinly: third scout pass, quality hardening, and production readiness

What shipped today

The session continued from the March 22 rollover with the issue queue empty. Two scout passes ran back-to-back, identifying and shipping 18 more issues across security, performance, UX, tests, dead code, and deployment readiness. The codebase went through 4 total scout passes (28 parallel scans) over the two-day session, bringing it from “functional but rough” to production-quality.

Security and input validation. The second round of hardening landed: HTML injection in invite emails was fixed by escaping household names with a new escapeHtml() helper (#178). Feedback rating validation now rejects non-integer or out-of-range values before hitting the database (#178). Pantry ingredient names are capped at 200 characters (#178). Recipe time fields (prep, cook, total) now clamp to 0-1440 minutes — no more negative or absurdly large values (#190). Household names validate 1-100 characters with trim (#190).

Performance. The plan page’s 3 redundant family_member queries were deduplicated (#188) — member IDs are now fetched once and reused across dietary_rules, ingredient_preferences, and dish_preferences queries, eliminating 2 unnecessary roundtrips. The pantry autocomplete was scoped to household recipes with a reduced 2000-row limit (#191), down from 5000 unscoped rows.

UX. The onboarding wizard finally displays errors instead of silently swallowing them (#189) — failed saves now show a red alert and prevent advancing to the next step. The household settings form gained “Saving…”/“Saved” feedback via a new HouseholdSettingsForm client component (#180). All icon-only buttons across the app now have aria-labels for screen reader accessibility (#180).

Tests. 10 unit tests were added for the ingredient parser (#179) covering fractions, mixed numbers, ranges, parenthetical notes, comma-separated notes, decimals, and name normalization. Test count: 65 → 75.

Dead code and deployment. Unused Card imports were cleaned from vote/page.tsx and plan-builder.tsx (#181). Critically, proxy.ts was correctly identified as NOT dead code — it’s the Next.js 16 middleware entry point (confirmed by build output showing “ƒ Proxy (Middleware)”). The .env.example was created documenting all 7 required environment variables (#182). CRON_SECRET was set in Vercel production after authenticating the CLI.

AI suggestions prep. The last major vision gap — “AI assists with suggestions” — was filed as #192 and labeled needs-clarification. It requires Paul’s input on LLM choice, budget, MVP scope, and rate limiting before decomposition.

Completed

• #161 Add ownership verification to family CRUD and cycle mutation actions
• #162 Fix RecipeSearch memoization bug: stale filter results
• #163 Remove dead code: notifyShoppingList, unused imports, orphaned helpers
• #164 Add unit tests for auth helpers and date utilities
• #165 Design pantry/inventory system (decomposed into #170-173)
• #170 Add pantry_items table with RLS
• #171 Add pantry management page with CRUD and navigation link
• #172 Show “in pantry” indicators on shopping list items
• #173 Add pantry match scoring dimension to ranking engine
• #178 Add input validation: sanitize email HTML, validate rating range, limit string lengths
• #179 Add unit tests for ingredient parser
• #180 Add success feedback to settings form and aria-labels to icon buttons
• #181 Remove unused Card imports from vote page and plan builder
• #182 Set CRON_SECRET in Vercel and create .env.example
• #188 Deduplicate family member queries on plan page
• #189 Display errors in onboarding wizard instead of silently swallowing
• #190 Add bounds validation on recipe time fields and household name length
• #191 Scope pantry autocomplete query to household and reduce payload

Release progress

• March 2026: 6/6 closed (complete)
• Phase 1–4: all closed

Carry-over

• #192 Design AI-assisted recipe suggestions — needs Paul’s input on LLM choice, budget, and MVP scope
• The full planning flow still has not been tested end-to-end in the browser with real data — carry-over since March 19
• Verify email notifications fire correctly with a real auth flow
• Deploy to production and verify new features render (pantry page, feedback section, shopping list pantry badges)

Risks

• The admin households page still has an N+1 pattern (3 queries per household in a loop). Low traffic makes this acceptable for now, but will need batching if household count grows.
• proxy.ts was nearly deleted by a scout scan that misidentified it as dead code. The DECISIONS.md entry about Next.js 16’s proxy export prevented the mistake — institutional memory working as intended.

Flags and watch-outs

• 10 commits landed on March 23 (18 issues closed across the two-day session)
• Test count: 65 → 75 (10 ingredient parser tests added)
• CRON_SECRET is now set in Vercel production — cron job should authenticate on next deployment
• .env.example created with all 7 required vars
• Issue queue is effectively empty — only #192 (needs-clarification) remains
• 4 of 5 product vision items are now implemented: weekly planning ✓, preferences/dietary ✓, pantry ✓, feedback/learning ✓. Only “AI assists” remains.