Tagged: ai
7 posts tagged with "ai". View all posts →
No LLM in My Kids App's Mascot: Pre-Generated Dialogue Instead
Why Penny, the mascot in my kids' money board game, never calls an LLM at runtime: a pre-generated dialogue bank, a fallback chain, and a one-time batch job.
I Emailed 312 Users Who Ignored My App. Their Replies Shipped Three Fixes in 48 Hours.
Dashboards told me retention was bad. Three user replies told me why: a deterministic filter, a cutout model eating clothes, and a quiz field nobody ever saved.
My AI Was Blind in Production for Weeks and Nothing Crashed
OutfitMaker's multimodal outfit suggestions were supposed to look at your actual clothes. In production they were running on text labels alone — 0 out of 25 items reaching the model with an image. No exception, no alert. Just a one-line log and a one-line Dockerfile fix.
I Added Circuit Breakers to a Rails App and Had to Patch the Gem Twice
Wrapping OutfitMaker's six external API calls in circuit breakers was the easy part. Making breaker_machines actually trip — and actually survive a worker restart — took two monkey patches and a lot of reading the gem's internals.
I Swapped Fashn for Gemini and Discovered Vertex AI Can't Return Images
Replacing OutfitMaker's virtual try-on engine looked like a service-object swap. It turned into a same-day cascade of five fixes, including discovering the Gemini API I was already using can't return images.
A TOCTOU Bug in My Gemini Rate Limiter
A read-then-write pattern in OutfitMaker's rate limiter let concurrent requests bypass the daily Gemini quota. The fix compresses to a single atomic increment, but understanding why takes a minute.
Multimodal AI for Outfit Suggestions
How sending actual photos to Gemini instead of text descriptions transformed OutfitMaker's suggestions from generic to genuinely useful.