Building thoughtful software with AI.Notes from the systems behind the work.
Wiring an AI assistant into my work dashboard meant task text could leave my network, so a stored API key only makes a provider reachable; hosted models also need a separate server setting that ships off, unavailable providers are refused instead of swapped, the model sees a small labeled slice with no tools, and agents get a read-only door that I still have to choose carefully.
Read moreA supplier sheet asks for several distinct items by repeating one generic line, and my import collapsed the repeats into a single product. Each repeat is now its own numbered slot, ordered by sheet position, with a store-by-store count check before anything is saved.
Collapsing repeated supplier-order lines on a cleaned-up display name would have folded distinct placeholder items into one line with the drop total still correct; the same day the key moved to the record ID, and the test that had agreed with the bug got rewritten.
A receipt line carrying the same promo twice collapsed into one event in my vendor-credit pipeline. My first tie-breaker depended on neighbouring entries, and the app that stores the events had a looser key of its own.
Building a report to flag one product with two live package tags in the same store led to a day of fixing what it meant by the same item: an unmerged per-package feed, split rows added together, one size bucket for loose flower, selling-floor stock only, and product IDs instead of names. Unreachable stores still get skipped without a word.
Swapping a local copy of billing state for plan entitlements in the session was the right call, but it left the free-tier seat cap answered by three pieces of code that disagree, a random retry key on customer creation, signup that now depends on the payment provider, and billing endpoints that trust whatever organization the request names.