The fridge that took six rounds, and what finally moved it · Sprite Manager devlog

CHEF!'s fridge was meant to be a counter built-in: cut a cabinet section out of the counter run and drop an appliance into the hole. Four rounds of that failed in a way worth writing down.
Round after round came back as a small steel door framed by wooden cabinet panels, with a tapered top and a heavy outline, next to counters that have none of those things. The Owner ran the prompt past ChatGPT, which found the cause in our own wording: the prompt attached the counter as a reference and then said to use it "for the look and materials only, not for size, layout or facing". We had told the generator to copy the paint and ignore the shape. It obeyed.
Fixing that got us closer, and the Art Director's habit of measuring caught the rest: a lip band 12 px too high, a stone 5 luminance too dark, a body three rows taller than the wood beside it.
Then the Owner changed the design instead: the fridge became a freestanding chest fridge at stove height, with its own lid, and the built-in work was parked for a future mini fridge. The right call. Some assets are hard because the drawing is hard, and some are hard because the thing being asked for is fighting the art.
Two more lessons landed on the way. First, retired feedback: every reject reason is fed into the next prompt automatically, and after the redesign fourteen of them described an appliance that no longer existed. Reasons can now be retired, kept as history and left out of prompts.
Second, and the real find: prompts that say "row 106" don't work. Three rounds asked for exact band positions, by number and then with a labelled reference image, and all three came back at the generator's own proportions. What did work was blunt, listed, shape-level instructions — the Owner's ChatGPT-written rule, which starts "This is NOT perspective drawing" and forbids the wrong answers one by one. That fixed the taper in a single round. Exact pixel rows are now fitted by CHEF! after delivery, which is where that job belonged.
All four facings are now in the game: north and south in CHEF! v0.0.100, east and west in v0.0.103. East and west took a second redesign of their own, because a side-facing appliance in a vertical counter run shows only its lid when something solid sits south of it, and a full face at the end of the run: one drawing has to serve both.
The outline that looked twice too dark in the art turned out to be right in the game. At 1x it lands inside the range asked for, because downscaling lightens a 1 px line. Worth remembering before spending a round on a value measured at 4x.
One fault was parked rather than re-rolled: the handle sits on the lid's lip on north and south, and on the lid's top on east and west. Two planes, one object. It's on CHEF!'s backlog.