The prompt box no longer arrives pre-filled, and deleting a stuck clip no longer forfeits the refund

The free clip was being spent on our sentence

Every generator opened with a random example already in the prompt box. Nothing downstream could tell that string apart from one a reader had typed — the draft writer persisted it, the checkout resume read it as a prompt waiting to run, and the welcome modal's Continue this clip ran whatever was in the box without a second press.

So the first button a new account meets, before it has typed anything, spent the account's one lifetime free clip on a sentence the site chose.

The ledger says that was not an edge case. 19 of the 33 free-lane clips ran one of the three prefilled prompts verbatim — all 19 within two minutes of signup, 19 distinct accounts, one each. The other 14 are 14 distinct prompts with no repeats, so that was the whole of it.

The box now fills only when you press something: Inspire me, a starter card, a handoff from another tool, or your own restored draft. With an empty box, Continue this clip puts the caret in the input instead of running.

Deleting a stuck generation was cancelling its refund

One row had been processing since 2026-08-28 — a free-lane clip, six days past the twenty-four hours in which the upstream model could still have answered it, with the account's one free clip spent on it. The hourly sweep that exists to close exactly that row reported found: 0 every time.

deleted_at was stamped forty seconds after the row was created. Somebody watched a spinner that had already hung and pressed delete — and delete stamped that column and did nothing else. The sweep then filtered on rows that had not been deleted, so pressing delete is what put the row beyond the reach of the only job that would have paid them back.

The two filters were agreeing backwards. Deleting is a statement about your gallery; the sweep is about what the run cost. The sweep no longer looks at it.