Why a build log (and not another tutorial)
Every AI shopping tutorial shows the same thing: install the SDK, call a tool, ship. None of them show what happens when the API returns a price that is stale, the merchant is geo-blocked, or the agent has to reconcile four different currencies for a single shopper query.
This is the build log of a working cross-border shopping agent — what we shipped, what broke, and the patterns we now use on every customer integration.
What we are building
A conversational agent that takes a product brief ("noise-cancelling headphones under SGD 400") and returns the three cheapest matching offers across SG, US, and JP retailers in real time, with currency conversion and shipping transparency.
