The 2-Minute Dogfooding Checkup

Four questions. One diagnosis. Zero shame. JavaScript turns this into a guided stepper; without JavaScript, all questions remain visible and usable.

Results stay local/public-safe unless you intentionally copy the decision record. They do not prove release readiness or customer fit.

Question 1 of 4

What hurts most right now? Meetings multiply faster than decisions. Small features keep becoming medium features in a trench coat. Bugs return like they have keys. Refactoring is always “after this release.” Incidents interrupt everything. AI or agent loops keep spending tokens without progress. The best answer is sometimes to do nothing and preserve stability. Someone is calling tool chains autonomy. Evidence exists, but it is scattered across screenshots and memory fragments.

Where does time leak most often? Recurring ceremonies Clarification and rework Review and QA loops Production support Waiting on dependencies Overlong prompts and repeated generation loops Unnecessary mutation attempts Capability claims that require cleanup Missing static ledgers and traceability

What does your team usually call done? Merged Demoable Tested Released Observable and supportable Within token and inference budgets Stable with no structural action needed Human-reviewed and claim-bounded Backed by source-controlled evidence packets

How does your team dogfood? We do not. One engineer clicks through it. The product team tries it late. Cross-functional users try real workflows. We have staged rollout, telemetry, feedback loops, and exit criteria. We enforce resource ceilings and stop runaway loops. We prefer no-op unless change is warranted. We red-team autonomy-washing before release. We inspect static ledgers before trusting the story.

BarkBowl

Educational satire. No real dog food. No money. Drafts and receipts still need human review.

BarkBowl is a fake premium dog-food shop for software work. Products are priced in time because that is what teams actually spend.

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