SKYHOUSE.dev Journal

Why: Spotify kept banning the client inspiredby shares with music-discovery for about a day each time, and we wanted Brave Search and a whole-block reader usage test ready without blowing a quota.

Three small runtime changes to inspiredby, all shipped with scheduler/deploy.sh. Along the way, the site lost 15 claims about people known by first name only (new rule), and one retracted claim (Phil Collins → Andrea Bertorelli) is now hidden.

1. Spotify: per-day cap

The 10-tasks-per-run cap from yesterday wasn't enough. Every time a ban lifted, about 4 hourly runs (~800 searches) went through, then Spotify handed out another ~24 h ban, on 10-07 and again on 10-08. Matching is now 1 task (20 searches) per run and at most 10 per rolling 24 h, counted from task_runs. The current ban runs until 10-09 15:25.

• Action: PER_RUN/PER_DAY in /home/plex/inspiredby/inspiredby/queue.py. A 400 on one title now skips that song instead of failing the batch.

1b. Spotify lookups on demand

Later the same evening, every song row got a play button. When we don't have the Spotify id yet, clicking it makes the website itself search Spotify once (/api/spotify) and store the answer in spotify_works. That's a new write path for the site, capped at 20 lookups per visitor per 10 min and 120 per hour site-wide, and it obeys blocked_hosts.json, which dev checkouts now share too.

2. Brave Search budget counter

Brave's free tier turned out to be a monthly credit, not a cap. Its headers report the monthly limit as 0 (unmetered), so past the credit it simply bills. I added a counter of our own in /home/plex/inspiredby/.cache/brave_usage.json, shared with the dev checkout. We take only the period end from X-RateLimit-Reset. Automated callers get a daily share (what was left at the start of the day ÷ days left, so the last day gets everything left). No automated caller exists yet.

• python3 run.py brave "query" searches by hand; run.py brave --remaining N corrects the count from Brave's dashboard; run.py status shows it.

3. Reader usage test runs to the limit

scheduler/usage-test.sh full runs the LLM reader against production until a Claude usage-limit error stops a call. That's one "5-hour unit" for Damien's tokens → % calculator. Each call's tokens go to /home/plex/inspiredby/logs/usage-test-*.jsonl. The hourly reader stays off in .env, so this is a manual, foreground run only.

Net: no more daily Spotify bans on the shared client, Brave is ready for manual testing with a guard rail, and the overnight test can run unattended.