We’re building doggos.ai in the open on the way to the closed beta. Here’s the running log of what shipped — filter it by what you care about.
42 updates
July 5, 2026Gift Studio
Welcome back — your saved gift now says so, and you can start fresh
The Gift Studio has always quietly saved your work — close the tab mid-design, come back next week, and you land exactly where you stopped. But it never said so: returning buyers were dropped into the middle of a five-step wizard with no explanation, and there was no way to start a different gift without finishing (or dismantling) the old one. A welcome-back note now greets a resumed draft by name — “Welcome back — your Twelve-Month Dog starring Biscuit is right where you left it.” — with a one-tap “Start a fresh gift” beside it. It's honest about the trade, too: starting fresh clears the saved draft.
Tapping “Turn Rex into a gift” on a dog's page used to lose silently to that saved draft — you asked for Rex, you got Biscuit's half-finished calendar, and Rex was nowhere. Now the note explains what you landed in, and the button becomes “Start fresh with Rex”, which brings his photo along like the link promised.
Same courtesy for the occasion and collection cards: when an in-progress draft would otherwise set your link aside, the note now names it and says a fresh start will use it. Nothing else about the wizard changed — drafts still save themselves, and simply carrying on is still the default.
July 4, 2026Site
The Studio now tells you what it's doing — even with your eyes closed
If you browse with a screen reader, the new Studio used to go quiet at exactly the wrong moments: you'd pick a look, and the 15-odd seconds of rendering — and the finished portrait landing in your tray — happened in complete silence. The Studio now says it out loud: “Rendering Renaissance oil — take 1”, and later “Biscuit as Renaissance oil is ready — take 1.” One calm sentence per event, nothing chatty.
Running out of free plays was silent too — sighted visitors saw the “out of free plays” banner, everyone else just had renders stop working with no explanation. That banner is now announced the moment it appears, so you hear why and what your options are.
And the little score bars on every dog card — the five-bar mini scorecard — were invisible to screen readers and to anyone on a touchscreen (their tooltips only show on mouse hover). Each card now carries the full sentence: “Scores out of 100: Floofiness 74, Snack Game 82…”. Nothing visual changed anywhere — same site, more of it actually reaches you.
July 4, 2026Gift Studio
Pick an occasion, and the studio now remembers why you came
The “Shop by occasion” cards on the Gift Studio page each promise a gift — “We'd lead with The Twelve-Month Dog” for a birthday, the Keepsake Baubles for the holidays. Until today, tapping one styled your gift nicely but then quietly forgot the promise: the shortlist you reached was the standard ranking, and the gift the card named could be sitting anywhere in it. Now the studio keeps the whole promise — pick “The holidays” and the Keepsake Baubles open your shortlist, badged “Our pick for the holidays”, with the card's own reason right there under it.
The studio also greets you in the language of your moment. Instead of naming an internal collection, the welcome line now confirms the occasion you picked, which gift we've put up top, and which set of looks we'll style it with — and that you can change either once you're in.
Nothing is locked: the full catalogue still follows, ranked for your brief exactly as before, and your tastes still shape every look. This is a head start, not a railroad — the point is that what the card says is what you get.
July 3, 2026Product
A new look, a new Studio — and farewell to cities
doggos.ai has a new heart: the Studio. Upload a photo of your dog, pick a look — Renaissance oil, astronaut, neon city, twenty in all — and art-direct it with your own words. It's free to try, no account needed, and it now sits front and centre on the homepage. The judging game isn't going anywhere; it's just no longer the only game in town.
With the fresh identity comes a brighter coat of paint — new display type, a warmer palette, and a new line at the top: your dog, but anything.
And we've retired cities. They were a leftover from our Tech Week origins, and with dog lovers arriving from everywhere, a six-city picker stopped making sense. Every leaderboard is now simply per judge pack, worldwide. Nothing earned is lost: every certificate and Hall of Fame spot recorded in the city era stays exactly where it is — those are permanent, as promised.
July 3, 2026Site
The safety net now has a safety net
The site is guarded by 275 automated tests that run on every change — but until today, nothing checked the tests themselves for the kind of silent decay code develops over time. Now the same type-safety inspection that polices the site's own code runs over the entire test suite on every change too.
Why that matters: a test that quietly rots can keep “passing” while no longer proving what it claims — the guard dog that looks awake but sleeps. This closes that gap, so when we say the pricing maths or the quiz's fairness is pinned by tests, the pins themselves are checked.
While wiring it up we also fenced things the other way: the site's own code can no longer accidentally lean on tools that only exist on our test bench and not on the real servers. Nothing you can see or tap changed today — this is scaffolding, checked twice.
July 3, 2026Fix
The breed report's maths and the quiz's fairness, now under guard
The percentages in a breed report's “Likely mix” are tidied up before you ever see them, so they always add to exactly 100. That tidying — and the breed quiz's round-building — now live under automated tests that run on every change, so this arithmetic can't quietly drift as the site evolves (26 new checks; 275 in all).
Writing those tests surfaced one real, rare edge and we fixed it: a breed the AI genuinely detected could round down to a “0%” line in the mix. Any breed on the report now always shows at least 1%.
The quiz checks pin what makes it a fair game: the right answer is always among the four choices, appears exactly once, never sits in a predictable position, and every choice is a real breed. Nothing about how the site looks or plays changed today — this is the scaffolding that keeps it honest tomorrow.
July 2, 2026Fix
Breed report numbers now say what they mean
On a breed report, the big confidence number used to be captioned “/100” while everywhere else we said “65% sure” — same number, two different outfits. It now reads as the percentage it is (“82%”, labelled “how sure we are”), on the page and on the card you see when a report is shared.
The “Likely mix” breakdown had it worse: each breed showed a bare number with no unit at all, sitting right under that “/100” — easy to misread. Every mix line now carries its % sign, because those numbers are shares of the mix, not scores.
And on a dog's scorecard, the five category rows are now headed “Scorecard · all /100”, so you don't have to guess what a 74 in Snack Game is out of. Nothing was rescored — every number is the same, it just tells you what it is.
July 2, 2026Site
Our own paperwork now tells the truth too
We hold this site to a simple rule: nothing fake, nothing overstated. This update turns that rule on ourselves. The project's front-page documentation still described the site from before the Gift Studio existed — no mention of gift products, and it even claimed we had no automated tests (we have 249, run on every change). It's been rewritten to match what's actually built.
Nothing on the site itself changed — a fresh sweep of every page you can visit found it all still honest, from real prices-are-placeholders notes to real sample artwork. This was about making sure the paper trail behind the site is as truthful as the site in front of you.
July 1, 2026Site
The changelog now filters by what you care about
This page had grown into one long wall of updates. It now opens with a set of filter chips — Gift Studio, Product, Fix, Site — each showing how many updates it holds, so you can jump straight to the changes you care about (just the gift news, say) instead of scrolling past everything.
Every update is still here and still in plain English; nothing was removed. If you're reading without scripts, the full list simply shows as before — the filters are a convenience laid on top, never a gate.
July 1, 2026Gift Studio
Start from the moment — shop the Gift Studio by occasion
The Gift Studio page now has a “Shop by occasion” section up top. Most people don't arrive wanting a phone case — they arrive because it's a birthday, the holidays are coming, a new puppy just landed, or a friend is simply dog-obsessed. Pick the moment and we point you straight at the gift we'd lead with, already pre-styled.
Each occasion tap drops you into the studio with a hand-curated collection ready to go — “A Year of Adventures” for a new arrival, “The Cozy Year” for the holidays — so you're one photo away from a finished idea instead of staring at a blank catalogue. Everything's still changeable once you're in.
It's the reason-first way most gift-shoppers actually think, and the way the rest of the pet-gift world merchandises. One deliberate hold-back: we're not adding a memorial option casually — it matters too much to get the tone wrong, so it's on our list to design with care.
June 30, 2026Fix
If something ever breaks, a friendly page instead of a blank screen
On the rare occasion a page hits an unexpected error — a momentary database hiccup, an image-AI service blinking — you used to land on a stark browser error screen with no way back. Now you get a calm, on-brand page that says it's our fault not yours, with a one-tap “Try again” and a link back to the index.
The menu and footer stay put on that page, so you're never stranded — you can carry on to the leaderboard or the Gift Studio in a click. If support ever needs to look into it, the page quietly shows a short reference code.
It's a safety net we hope you never see, but it makes a bad moment feel handled rather than broken — part of getting the site dependable for the closed beta.
June 30, 2026Site
The leaderboard's “which dogs am I seeing” line reads clearer
At the bottom of the leaderboard, the little counter that tells you which dogs you're looking at now reads in plain English — “101–150 of 1,240 · page 3 of 25” — with big numbers comma-grouped just like everywhere else on the site, instead of a cramped “1240” and a “page 1 / 25” that looked like a fraction.
We also made it kinder to screen readers: they now hear a clean sentence (“Showing 101 to 150 of 1,240. Page 3 of 25.”) rather than a string of dashes and dots.
Same information, easier to read — and we moved the behind-the-scenes counting into one tested place so it always adds up.
June 29, 2026Fix
Closed a quiet open door on the breed quiz
The “you vs the AI” breed quiz starts a fresh round each time it loads a new dog — and each one quietly fetches a photo and saves a little record. We already limited how many rounds you can answer in an hour, but not how many you could start, so an automated script could have spun up rounds endlessly. We've put a sensible hourly cap on starting rounds too.
The cap sits comfortably above anything real play hits, so you'll never notice it — only a flood of automated requests would. If you ever do reach it, the quiz now says so plainly (“take a breather”) instead of showing a generic error.
Housekeeping that keeps the site fair and our running costs sane as we head toward the closed beta — with an automated test pinning the new limit so it can't drift.
June 29, 2026Site
A dog's page now shows their standing, plainly
Each dog's page used to label the big number at the top “Entry #003”, which read like a fixed sign-up number — but it was actually their ranking, and it shifts as scores change. It now says what it really is: “Rank #3 of 24”, so you can see at a glance where they place among everyone their judge pack has scored.
It's the same wording we already use elsewhere — the home page's top dog, and the winners' certificates — so a dog's standing now reads the same way wherever you see it.
June 28, 2026Fix
A tripwire so the “everything stopped responding” bug can't come back
Earlier today we fixed a serious bug where a security setting had quietly switched off all the interactive parts of the site. The hard part: it was invisible to every automatic check we run, because the pages looked perfect to a machine reading them — only a real browser noticed nothing responded.
So we've added an automatic tripwire around exactly that setting. It now checks, on every change, that the site is still allowed to come alive in your browser, that photo uploads and the breed-quiz picture can still load, and that the genuine protections (no framing the site, no form hijacking, no file-type sniffing) are all still in place.
Nothing about the site looks different — this is a safety net. The thing that broke for two weeks now trips an alarm the instant it's touched, so it can't quietly slip back in.
June 28, 2026Fix
Buttons, uploads and pickers work again — a big one
We found and fixed a serious bug: a security setting we added earlier this month was, as a side effect, switching off all of the site's interactive bits in the browser — uploading a photo, stepping through the Gift Studio, switching leaderboard views, playing the breed quiz. The pages looked right but didn't respond. They all work again now.
The same setting was also blocking photo uploads and the breed-quiz picture from loading. We've corrected it so those work, while keeping the genuine protections (no one can frame the site, hijack a form, or sniff file types).
If something felt oddly unresponsive recently, this was why — and it's sorted.
June 28, 2026Gift Studio
Tap a collection, start with it already chosen
On the Gift Studio page we show themed collections — A Year of Adventures, The Cozy Year, Old Masters and more. Tapping one now actually starts you off in that collection: add your photo and your calendar (or any multi-image gift) arrives pre-styled with that set, ready to tweak.
A little note up top confirms which collection you picked. Choosing a single-image gift like a mug? No change there — collections are about the multi-month sets. And you can restyle to any other collection in one tap, just as before.
June 27, 2026Site
Counts that read like English — “1 entry”, not “1 entries”
The little “Live · N entries” badge in the header, and the per-city counts on the filter strip, used to read “1 entries” whenever there was exactly one dog. They now say “1 entry” and switch to “entries” for everything else — a small thing you see on nearly every page.
Big numbers are easier to read too: counts now group their thousands (1,234 rather than 1234), so the leaderboard stays legible as it fills up.
Behind the scenes we replaced four hand-written “one or many?” rules dotted around the gift studio and breed quiz with one shared, tested helper — so counts read consistently everywhere and can't drift apart again.
June 27, 2026Gift Studio
When you've no strong opinion, we lead with the crowd-pleaser
If your creative brief doesn't lean any particular way, the studio now suggests the Renaissance oil portrait first for the single-portrait gifts — the look the whole category sells most — instead of whatever style happened to be first in our list. Tell us a vibe, an interest, or star a look and that always wins; this only decides the toss-ups.
While we were in the order screen we fixed a line that still said “our print partner makes it and ships it” — the same just-launch overclaim we cleared off the rest of the site last week, hiding on the confirmation page because it only shows after you place an order. It now matches everywhere else: printing and posting switch on at launch, always after you've approved the proof.
June 26, 2026Fix
Straight talk about where the Gift Studio is
The Gift Studio is in open beta: you can design your dog's gifts for real right now (the AI renders are genuine), but checkout, printing and shipping aren't switched on yet — so nothing is charged. That was only spelled out at the very last step; now there's a clear “Open beta” note up front on the Gift Studio page and before we ever ask for your photo or email.
Trimmed a couple of lines that implied printing and shipping were already running — we described “our print partners” and parcels “shipped to the door” as if live. We're not there yet, so the copy now says what's true today and what lands at launch.
Nothing about the studio itself changed — design, art-direction and the real AI renders all work exactly as before. This is about being honest, up front, about what you can and can't do yet.
June 25, 2026Gift Studio
Themed collections, front and centre
The Gift Studio page now showcases our themed collections — hand-curated sets like A Year of Adventures, The Cozy Year, and Old Masters — so you can see the idea before you start: twelve months that read as one story, not a grab-bag of twelve unrelated filters.
Each collection shows a real preview of its signature looks and the running order behind it. It was already built into the design step (one tap re-themes the whole calendar); now it's a reason to start, not a surprise you find halfway through.
This is the thing that sets us apart — anyone can stamp a filter on each month; we art-direct the set as one coherent gift. It felt right to actually say so on the page that sells it.
June 25, 2026Fix
A safety net under the winners' certificates
Top dogs earn certificates — Best in Show, People's Choice, and one for each of their pack's five judged categories. The logic that turns a certificate's web address into the right title and score now has its own automated tests, including a check that a made-up or retired pack still shows a friendly name instead of a raw code.
We also taught the code to police itself: the link between a certificate and the score it ranks on is now verified by the compiler, so a future change can't add a new certificate without wiring up its score — the kind of mismatch that would otherwise slip through unnoticed.
And we finished a clean-up we started earlier this month — the last place that read web addresses the unsafe way (the “beat the AI” breed quiz) now does it the safe way too, matching the rest of the site.
June 22, 2026Fix
Squashed an edge-case bug in how we read web addresses
A handful of reserved words (like “constructor”) have special meaning to the language the site is built in. If one ever turned up in the address bar — say /packs/constructor, or a leaderboard filter of ?city=constructor — our lookups could mistake it for a real pack, city or style and render a broken page instead of a clean “not found.” We now check membership the safe way everywhere, so those addresses behave correctly.
We also tidied how the leaderboard builds and reads its web addresses: the rules for a clean, shareable link (drop anything that's just the default, keep what isn't) now live in one place with automated tests, including a round-trip check that a link always reads back as the exact view it points to. That keeps Google seeing one tidy address per view instead of several look-alikes.
Invisible groundwork: 42 new automated tests now cover the leaderboard's links and the scoring data behind every dog's categories — a safety net so a future change can't quietly mis-pair a score or a link.
June 22, 2026Site
Easier to find on Google — every page now on the map
Search engines read a “sitemap” to know which pages exist. Ours had quietly fallen behind: whole sections — Breed ID, the breed quiz, the Hall of Fame, and every breed report people generate — weren't listed, so they were harder for Google to find. They're all on the map now.
We were careful about what we don't list: the private gallery and the upload page stay off the map on purpose, matching the “please don't index this” signals already on those pages — so we never send mixed messages to a search engine.
Behind the scenes we split the map-building into a small, self-checking piece with automated tests, so a future page can't silently go missing — and gave the Hall of Fame its own proper search-and-share preview while we were there.
June 21, 2026Fix
Pinned the limits that keep things fair (and the bills sane)
The rules that cap how many uploads, AI portraits, and gift renders one person can run in an hour or a day are now covered by automated tests — including the exact edge where a limit kicks in — so a future tweak can't accidentally lock out a real user or leave the door open to abuse.
To make that possible we separated the “how many have happened” counting from the “is this allowed” decision, so the decision can be checked on its own. The limits themselves are unchanged — nothing you do on the site behaves differently.
Quiet groundwork: a safety net under the part of the site that protects everyone's experience and our running costs as we head toward the closed beta.
June 21, 2026Gift Studio
Tell us what they're into — we'll pick the looks
The creative brief now asks the one question a gift-giver actually knows the answer to: what's the recipient into? Tap a few interests — sci-fi & space, history, the great outdoors, life by the sea, cozy nights in — and we steer the whole suite toward looks that fit.
A sci-fi fan gets space captains, astronauts and a neon city pulled to the front; a cozy answer leans into wildflowers, soft watercolours and fairy lights. It works alongside the vibe chips and the looks you star — every signal sharpens the same shortlist.
No new artwork to wait on: interests map onto the sixteen real styles the studio already renders, so what we suggest is always something you can actually make.
June 20, 2026Gift Studio
Your calendar can start in any month
The wall calendar no longer always opens on January. It now starts in the current month by default — so a calendar made in June runs June through May, not one that's already half spent.
In the design step there's a “Calendar starts in” picker: choose any month and the twelve tiles re-label around it. Your styles, renders and notes stay exactly as you left them — only the month names shift.
Both the design step and the order summary now spell out the window your calendar covers, e.g. “June 2026 – May 2027”, so there's no guesswork about what you're buying.
June 20, 2026Site
Clearer for screen readers — and easier on the eyes
When you upload a dog, guess a breed, or generate a portrait, a screen reader now speaks each step out loud — “Uploading…”, “Scoring…”, and, if a photo is turned away, the reason why — so people who don't watch the screen aren't left guessing during the wait.
Nudged the faintest grey text a shade darker so the quiet captions and hints clear the accessibility bar for readability — a little easier for everyone to read, especially in bright light.
June 19, 2026Fix
Every change now gets checked automatically
Set up automated checks that run on every change we make — code style, type-safety, and the gift-engine tests — so a mistake gets caught before it can reach the site rather than after.
Tidied those checks so they run completely clean, ignoring the bits that aren't ours to police (vendored templates and machine-generated files).
Nothing changes in what you see — this is groundwork that keeps the site dependable as it grows toward the closed beta.
June 19, 2026Site
“Recent sightings” now tells you how recent
The Recent sightings strip on the home page now shows when each dog was added — “Added 2 hours ago”, “yesterday”, or a clean date for older ones — so the section finally lives up to its name.
It reuses the same plain, consistent date wording introduced across the site, and only appears where recency is the point — the leaderboard cards stay focused on the scores.
June 18, 2026Gift Studio
The next step is always under your thumb
On a phone, the “Next” and “Order it” buttons now ride along pinned to the bottom of the screen as you scroll a step, instead of hiding at the very end of a long page — so moving forward is always one tap away.
When you move to a new step, the page now glides back up to the top of it, so you start reading from the beginning rather than landing halfway down.
Both touches are mobile-first and respect a “reduce motion” setting; the desktop studio is unchanged.
June 18, 2026Site
Cleaner dates, told plainly
A dog's scorecard now reads “Added 13 June 2026” instead of a clock-precise timestamp like “6/13/2026, 4:53:21 PM” — the date, without the noise.
Breed reports now say how long ago they were made (“2 hours ago”, “yesterday”), which reads more naturally for something you just generated.
Behind the scenes, every date on the site is now formatted the same way everywhere, so it looks identical whether the page is built on our servers or in your browser.
June 18, 2026Site
Smoother on a phone
Tapping a name, email, or art-direction box no longer makes the page lurch and zoom in on iPhones — forms stay put while you type.
The top menu now scrolls sideways with a thumb instead of cramming six links onto a narrow screen, and the browser bar takes on our colour so the page feels like one piece.
Pages now fill the screen correctly as the phone's toolbars slide away — no more odd gaps or a footer that creeps up the page.
June 17, 2026Fix
A safety net under the gift engine
Added the first automated tests covering the bits of the Gift Studio that decide your prices, themes, and collections — so a future change can't quietly break the maths or the suggestions without us noticing.
While writing them we found and fixed a small input-validation gap: certain reserved words (like “toString”) were wrongly accepted where a style or product name was expected. Harmless in practice, now properly rejected.
Nothing changes in what you see — this is groundwork that keeps the studio dependable as it grows.
June 17, 2026Gift Studio
Themed collections — your dog's calendar, as one story
Your calendar (and any multi-piece gift) now comes themed as a coherent collection — “A Year of Adventures”, “The Cozy Year”, “Old Masters”, and more — instead of a random mix of looks. Every month is different, but the whole year hangs together.
We pick the collection that fits your brief automatically, so a cozy answer gets a cozy year and an epic one gets space captains and caped crusaders.
In the design step you can restyle the entire set with one tap. It only changes the looks that need changing — anything you've already rendered or fine-tuned stays exactly as you left it.
June 17, 2026Site
Easier to use with a keyboard or screen reader
Added a “Skip to content” link so people navigating by keyboard can jump straight past the menu to what they came for.
The main menu is now a proper navigation landmark and marks the page you're on, so screen readers announce where you are.
Every button and link now shows a clear outline when you tab to it, and if your device asks for less motion, the site quiets its animations.
June 16, 2026Fix
Honest prices — no invented discounts
Removed the struck-through “was” prices on a few gift cards. They suggested a saving against a price we'd never actually charged, so they're gone until we have real prices to mark down from.
What you see now is one clear launch price per item — still a placeholder until print costs are final, and labelled as such, but never dressed up as a sale.
Also taught search engines that doggos.ai is a gift studio as well as a dog leaderboard, so the gifts side is findable too.
June 16, 2026Site
A proper footer — the whole site, at a glance
Rebuilt the footer at the bottom of every page into a simple, organised directory — grouped into making something, the leaderboard, and the rest — so you can get anywhere from anywhere.
Surfaced places that used to be tucked away, like the Gift Studio, the Hall of Fame, and Breed ID, all in one scannable spot.
A calmer, clearer layout that reads at a glance on phones and desktop alike.
June 16, 2026Site
Security and search-engine hardening
Added site-wide security headers — a content-security policy, strict transport security, clickjacking and MIME-sniffing protection, and a locked-down permissions policy — so the site is safer to use on any network.
Taught search engines who we are: every page now carries structured data describing the brand and the site, and the Gift Studio adds a breadcrumb trail, which helps doggos.ai show up properly in results.
No fake data anywhere in the markup — only true facts about the brand, no invented ratings or prices.
June 15, 2026Product
Three new things to make: blanket, phone case, ornaments
Added a plush fleece blanket (one big hero portrait), a slim everyday phone case, and a boxed set of three keepsake ornaments — the categories dog lovers actually buy, drawn from a scan of what the market sells.
Each one runs through the exact same gpt-image-2 pipeline as everything else in the studio, so you art-direct them just like the calendar: pick a look, reroll, give notes.
The picker now suggests them in the right spots — a phone case leads when you're treating yourself; a blanket and the ornaments rise when you're shopping for a gift.
June 15, 2026Gift Studio
Honest previews while you choose a style
The style picker and gift shortlist now show genuine AI sample renders for every look, instead of a tinted filter laid over your own photo. What you browse is what the model actually makes.
Reworded the steps so it's clear those thumbnails are real examples — your own dog gets rendered into the looks you choose, in the design step.
No more placeholder magic anywhere in the create flow: every image you see before you generate is a real render.
June 13, 2026Gift Studio
Real artwork on the Gift Studio, everywhere
The Gift Studio landing page now shows genuine AI sample renders — the same gpt-image-2 pipeline you use, across all sixteen looks — instead of placeholder swatches. What you see is what the machine actually makes.
Samples are built from an original, studio-generated dog, so every style on the page is a real transformation rather than a mock-up.
Started a living changelog (this page) and an internal market scan to keep the catalog honest about what dog lovers actually buy.