ChromieCraft price backfill tool for AH-bot overrides

[icemansparks]

What

A standalone, zero-dependency Python tool (tools/price-backfill/) that regenerates data/sql/db-world/2023_11_16_mod_auctionhousebot_priceOverride.sql from ChromieCraft's live auction prices, filling the coverage gap where most AH-tradeable items currently fall back to fixed default pricing.

How

• Reads candidate item IDs exported from acore_world.item_template (AH-tradeable filter: bonding IN (0,2,3), Quality <= 5, excl. quest/key classes).
• Fetches per-item price stats from wowauctions.net's Next.js _next/data JSON endpoint (queried by item ID only; browser UA; buildId resolved fresh, re-resolved on mid-run redeploy).
• Maps avg_price → avgPrice, minimum_buyout → minPrice; floors both at vendor SellPrice; clamps min ≤ avg; configurable PRICE_SCALE (default 1.0).
• Full refresh of the override table, and emits deviations.csv — a worst-first review worklist of every item whose new price differs ≥1.5× from the shipped override, so contested prices can be decided by hand.

Robustness

• Concurrent fetch with polite rate limiting, exponential backoff on 429/5xx, checkpoint/resume.
• Worker exceptions are recorded (fetch-failed/error), never silently dropped.
• Generation-keyed recovery pass re-fetches items falsely 404'd during a mid-run site redeploy.

Tests

cd tools/price-backfill && python3 -m unittest discover — 26 passing (stdlib unittest, no network in unit tests). Live smoke run verified end-to-end.

Notes

• The tool writes to the working tree; the regenerated SQL is intended to be reviewed via git diff (and deviations.csv walked) before committing — it is not included in this PR. This PR is the tool, spec, and plan only.
• Design + implementation plan under docs/superpowers/.