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Architecture

How we designed things that are actually running.

Written for the person who will notice if we are wrong. Each piece names the constraints, the trade-off we took, and what it cost us - and most end with something you can go and check for yourself.

Flutter uploads that survive a crash with durable_queue: the upload_photo task is saved in queue.db, the app is killed, and start() schedules attempt 2.
Shipped and running
28 Oct 2026

Your App Retries the Upload. A Crash Still Loses It.

A retry loop lives in memory, so a closed app takes the upload with it. The design where the task is saved on the phone before enqueue returns, waiting for signal costs no attempts, a crash costs one, and the server drops the repeat. From durable_queue, our open-source Flutter package.

https://github.com/boffincoders/durable_queue/actions/workflows/device-tests.ymlRead it
Grounded AI extraction: a forwarded blood request fills a form, and the parser vetoes the model's O negative because the message never gave a blood group.
Shipped and running
27 Oct 2026

Grounded AI Extraction: Let the Model Fill the Form, Let a Parser Veto It

Ask a model to fill a form from a forwarded message and it fills every field, including the ones the message never mentioned. The design where the model's answer is kept only when the user's own words back it, what that costs, and the case it still gets wrong: a photo.

Send your extractor a message with no blood group and check that the field comes back empty.Read it
Hosted speech to text uploads the whole recording: one minute of speech is a 1.92 MB box of audio beside a 900 byte cube, about 150 words of text.
Shipped and running
23 Sept 2026

Your speech-to-text sends the recording. It only needed the words.

A speech feature exists to turn a voice into a paragraph. Most of them upload the voice to a vendor to get it. The design where the model runs on your own server, what the queue of one costs, and the part nobody admits - the audio is still stored, on purpose.

ffmpeg -i clip.webm -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le clip.wav && ls -l clip.*Read it
An email editor holding a draft the model wrote, with an audit gate of 9 block and 14 warn rules above a gold Send button under a person's cursor, while the model's dashed line to Send is cut by a red cross marked no send tool.
Shipped and running
12 Sept 2026

Let the AI write your outreach email. Never let it send it.

A model that can send will one day send the wrong thing. The design that lets a model draft into an editor, runs every draft through a rulebook in code - nine blocks, fourteen warnings - and keeps the send button for a person. Every rule quoted from a system in production.

Ask the vendor: which function sends, and can the model call it?Read it
A support bot window where the customer asks "can I get a refund?", the refund policy, billing FAQ and cancellation terms are sent to the model, and the bot replies "You can get a refund.", while the rule "Never promise a refund." hangs outside the window, stamped not sent.
Shipped and running
10 Sept 2026

Why your RAG chatbot ignores the rules you gave it

A knowledge base outgrows the context budget, retrieval starts choosing what the model sees, and the rules you wrote become documents competing for space. How to measure what your bot actually receives, and why some of it must never be scored.

context budget ÷ knowledge base sizeRead it
Two stacks of pages, before.xml with 10,722 URLs and after.xml with 10,723, joined by a move to Next.js 16 and stamped none dropped, under the line Your rebuild will drop URLs.
Shipped and running
6 Sept 2026

Your rebuild will drop URLs. Google will tell you in six weeks.

We moved a 10,723-page site to a new framework. The sitemap diff that proved no URL moved, the four things it cannot catch, and the outage that mattered more than any of it.

https://timezones.in/sitemap.xmlRead it
You wrote one, your app asks for six: a dependency tree runs from the CAMERA permission you wrote down through a scanning library, an analytics helper and a networking library, which sends INTERNET in red into a phone holding six permissions.
Shipped and running
4 Sept 2026

Your Android app asks for internet permission. You never wrote it.

The manifest you write is not the one that ships. Every library brings its own, the build merges them, and a permission can arrive four levels down. How to see what your app really asks for, and the one line that refuses it - from an app that had told people it needed no internet.

bundletool dump manifest --bundle=app-release.aabRead it