A follow-up to Teaching an AI to Pick Its Own Brain
In the last post, I ended with a plan: replace the Groq LLM categorizer with local multilingual-e5-large embeddings. Find similar past messages, vote on the category, skip the API call. Simple.
It took a Groq outage to actually make me ship it.
On 2026-05-22, Groq went down for two hours. 503 requests fell back to medium tier silently — no errors surfaced to users, but nobody got the model they should have. That's the kind of "resilience" that feels fine until it isn't.
So I shipped Phase 2. Here's what I got wrong.
