Most of what I learned this year came from building the interesting parts. The retrieval, the prompts, the agent loop. The stuff that's fun to think about.
Then I put a FastAPI endpoint in front of one of my projects, showed it to a friend, and watched him break it in about four minutes. Not maliciously. He just asked something long and weird and the request sat there spinning until he closed the tab.
That's when I realised the model was maybe a third of the actual work. The rest is the stuff wrapped around it, which is boring and nobody writes tutorials about it because it isn't interesting to build.
This is what I've ended up with. I'm still a student, so treat this as notes rather than advice from someone who's run this at scale. I probably have some of it wrong.
The call has no timeout by default and that is a problem
