(De)Publius

A single-page tool that asks Claude to identify the author of a 150–500 word writing sample, streaming its reasoning back in real time. Built as the companion to an article on AI-driven deanonymization at scale.

Live: https://depublius-production.carey-lening.workers.dev

How it works

You paste a passage you wrote (please use unpublished drafts, not already-public work). Claude reads it, thinks out loud, and tells you who it thinks wrote it. You can optionally turn on web search to let it cross- reference public corpora. Then you can tell us whether it got you right.

Privacy

Your writing is not stored anywhere. The optional survey responses are stored anonymously in a SQLite database on Cloudflare. See DESIGN.md for details.

Run your own copy

1. npm install
2. cp .dev.vars.example .dev.vars and paste your Anthropic key (and optionally a real Turnstile secret; the example uses Cloudflare's "always-pass" test secret for local dev).
3. npx wrangler d1 create depublius and paste the resulting database ID into wrangler.toml.
4. npm run db:migrate:local
5. npm run dev

Deploy

1. npx wrangler secret put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY --env production
2. npx wrangler secret put TURNSTILE_SECRET --env production
3. npm run db:migrate:remote
4. npm run deploy

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Operations

Pull survey + feedback data

Whenever you want a snapshot of what people have submitted:

cd "/home/privacat/Software Projects/depublius"
npx wrangler d1 execute depublius --remote --command "SELECT * FROM surveys"  --json > /tmp/surveys.json
npx wrangler d1 execute depublius --remote --command "SELECT * FROM feedback" --json > /tmp/feedback.json
npx wrangler d1 execute depublius --remote --command "SELECT * FROM daily_budget" --json > /tmp/budget.json

Or a full SQL dump of everything:

npm run db:export   # writes ./export.sql in the project dir

To convert a JSON export to CSV with jq:

jq -r '.[0].results | (map(keys) | add | unique) as $cols
  | $cols, (.[] | [.[$cols[]]]) | @csv' /tmp/surveys.json > /tmp/surveys.csv

Watch live production logs

Useful when something looks wrong or you want to see real-time traffic:

cd "/home/privacat/Software Projects/depublius"
npx wrangler tail --env production --format pretty

Leave it running in one terminal, hit the live URL in a browser, and you'll see request lines + any console.error from the Worker (including upstream Anthropic errors with the actual response body).

Bump the daily spend cap

Default is DAILY_BUDGET_CENTS = "500" (= $5/day) per wrangler.toml's [env.production.vars] block. To raise it (e.g. to $20):

1. Edit wrangler.toml → [env.production.vars] → DAILY_BUDGET_CENTS = "2000"
2. npm run deploy

Rotate the Anthropic API key

cd "/home/privacat/Software Projects/depublius"
npx wrangler secret put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY --env production
# paste the new key when prompted

No redeploy needed — secrets take effect immediately.

Re-enable Turnstile (currently disabled)

Turnstile is wired up but not in the request path because the widget refused to render reliably in v1 testing. To turn it back on:

1. In src/analyze.ts, uncomment the verifyTurnstile block.
2. In public/app.js, re-add a working bootstrap (the previous attempts are in git history under commits with turnstile in the message).
3. In public/index.html, re-add the <div class="cf-turnstile" ... id="turnstile">.
4. Confirm the production Turnstile site has the deployed hostname in its allowed-domains list.
5. npm run deploy.

Roll back a bad deploy

cd "/home/privacat/Software Projects/depublius"
npx wrangler rollback --env production
# pick the previous version from the interactive list

Take the site down

cd "/home/privacat/Software Projects/depublius"
npx wrangler delete --env production
# or, gentler: edit wrangler.toml to add `workers_dev = false`, then `npm run deploy`

License

MIT