We built an agent swarm that reprices a market every night on Google Cloud. The part worth writing about is not what the model does. It is where the model is not allowed to go.
This project started with an advertisement. A good-looking monthly price for a car I might actually want, and a catch I only found by clicking through to the provider. The most common catch was the mileage: the advertised price assumed 5,000 kilometres a year and the longest available term. Drive a normal 10,000 and the figure moves. Sometimes the advertised price was not even current any more, and the provider's own page quoted considerably more.
Every one of those numbers is defensible on its own. Together they make an offer look like a price when it is really a price under conditions, and the conditions are the part that gets left out.
Plinkie is a comparison site built around that observation. Two design decisions follow from it directly. Every offer is stored per mileage tier rather than as a single headline figure, so a car appears at the mileage you actually drive instead of at the one that photographs best. And every price carries the moment we last saw it confirmed at the source: after 72 hours without confirmation, the site labels it as unconfirmed rather than showing it as fact.
