Risks and Technical Debt

Working-directory-relative persistence: both the read-only recipe/ingredient/glass data and the read-write ingredient-to-dispenser mapping are located relative to the process’s current working directory rather than a fixed, installed location. Starting the Station from an unintended working directory silently changes, or loses access to, its data instead of failing loudly.

Simulated hardware ships in the same binary as production: the compile-time switch between simulated and real Pods only changes which code path runs. The simulator code itself is always linked into every build, including the one shipped to a real machine. This has no functional effect today, but the production binary does carry code that never executes on the actual device, and any future change to the simulator must be validated against the production build as well.

Single shared executor: every Pod exchange and every UI-triggered action runs on one execution context. A per-exchange timeout bounds any single exchange, but a very slow or misbehaving exchange can still delay unrelated work until its own timeout elapses, since nothing runs in parallel to it today.