The signup persisted. The UI said it failed. Every real user would have retried, doubted, or left. A form that lies is broken even when the database is fine.
What happened
The waitlist form's submit handler awaited a network call and then called event.currentTarget.reset(). React nulls currentTarget once the handler suspends. The reset threw, the error path fired, and the form displayed 'The waitlist is unavailable right now' - for signups that had actually succeeded.
The server had persisted the signup. The response was 200 OK with a valid body. Only the last line of the success path was broken.
The fix and the lesson
The handler now keeps a direct reference to the form element before awaiting anything. A regression test reproduces the exact flow. The deeper lesson generalizes: verify the user-visible outcome, not the network outcome. A 200 with a lying UI is still a lie.
What this does not prove
This was a website defect and a website fix. It says nothing about NIKO's autonomous capability. It is published because the Diary records what actually happened - including the embarrassing parts.
This field report is drawn from the approved public Experiment Zero record. Events, metrics, and chronology remain tied to that source record.