A screen that was still connected and still displaying its pairing code could not be
paired. Reloading the player produced the same code, and the on-screen instruction
("restart the display to get a new code") could not help.
devices.created_at is written once, at first registration, and the row is never recreated:
a player persists its device_id and its pairing code in local storage and re-registers
with them forever. Expiry was measured from created_at, so 15 minutes after first boot the
row became permanently unclaimable while the device kept heartbeating — and a restart
reused the stored identity and reproduced the same code, so there was no way out.
Observed in production: an unclaimed web player, still online and heartbeating, whose row
was created 4 days 20 hours earlier and had been unpairable for all but its first 15
minutes. Prod is carrying several such rows; alpha has some 13 days old.
Key expiry on last_heartbeat instead, falling back to created_at for a row that has never
checked in. That answers the question the operator actually has — is this screen still
there showing me this code? — while keeping the property the expiry exists for: a device
that has genuinely gone away still expires.
Trade-off, taken deliberately: a code stays claimable while its screen is connected rather
than for a fixed 15 minutes. That is what the product implies, since the code is on the
screen the whole time, and guessing is bounded by lib/pair-lockout (5 failures per IP per
15 min) and the 5/min route limit rather than by this TTL.
SERVER-ONLY. The player's device:registered handler reads only device_id and device_token
and has no way to display a server-issued code, so reissuing one would have left fielded
players showing a stale code — strictly worse. This fix needs no player update and
un-strands every already-affected device in the field on deploy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
