A computed verdict can still be wrong
hop.flights' whole pitch is a verdict that's computed, not guessed. For any search with more than one passenger, it was computing that verdict from two numbers that didn't describe the same trip.
hop.flights answers one question — use points, or pay cash — and the pitch of the verdict engine is that the answer is computed from real loyalty balances and real cash prices, never generated. That's the moat: no hedge, no disclaimer, just a number. Which also means that when the number is wrong, it's wrong with the same flat confidence as when it's right. A solo search checks out. Add a second passenger to the identical search and the verdict can flip outright, points to cash or the reverse, while the page states it with total certainty. A DeepWiki audit surfaced it as the highest-priority open issue. Root cause: Seats.aero returns award pricing per seat, Duffel returns cash pricing as a total already summed across the party, and the search function divides one against the other without checking which is which — the Seats.aero client never reads the party-size parameter, so the number in the search box is invisible to half the calculation. The result inflates cents-per-point roughly by party size. The fix is arithmetic, not architecture: scale the award side by party size before it meets the cash side. It survived this long because the mock fixtures used in day-to-day dev don't scale by party size either, so the bug never got a chance to surface until real data. It's now one of four hard gates before billing turns on. A computed verdict is only better than a guess if the arithmetic checks out.