Notes/July 29, 2026/4 min read
The numbers we deleted
Our homepage claimed 12,000 documents audited and an 8× speed-up, under a heading that said “Proof, not promises”. Both were placeholders. Here's what replaced them.
By GASPEROHLAB
Contents
There was a section on this site headed “Proof, not promises”. It carried four large figures: 12k+ documents audited, 8× faster turnaround, 100% on-prem, 0 bytes leaving the building. Directly above them, in the source, sat this:
// NOTE: these are illustrative placeholders
// — swap in the real numbers before launch.They were never swapped. That is an ordinary way for a site to end up lying: nobody decided to, someone wrote a plausible number to see whether the layout worked, and the layout worked.
Two of the four were never a problem
“100% on-prem” and “0 bytes leaving the building” aren't measurements. They're architectural facts — statements about how the thing is built, true the same way “it makes no network calls” is true. Nobody has to audit them and they can't drift.
The other two were measurements of deployments we don't publish telemetry for. Twelve thousand documents over what period, across how many customers? Eight times faster than which baseline? We couldn't answer either question, which means we shouldn't have been asking a reader to accept the answer.
Count something you already know
The replacement figures are counted from the work archive at build time. The number of released products and the number in production are facts this site already holds — they render the project cards forty pixels further down. Deriving the headline figures from the same array means they cannot disagree with the page beneath them, and adding a project updates them without anyone remembering to.
const released = projects.filter((p) => p.status === "Released").length;
const building = projects.filter((p) => p.status === "In Production").length;A number you can't source isn't proof. It's a promise wearing proof's clothes.
Where the real numbers go
Not nowhere — the case studies. A figure attached to a specific deployment, with its scope stated, is a claim someone can interrogate. The same figure floating on a homepage beside three others is decoration, and the larger it's set, the more decorative it becomes.
The lesson isn't “don't use placeholders”. It's that a placeholder under a heading claiming proof is a different category of debt from a placeholder in a layout, and it should never have survived the same review.