A comic shop employee photographs a back issue on a phone. The system has to come back with the right title, the right issue number, and the right variant, because a first-print variant and a common reprint of the same book are the same picture with different economics. That is the identification problem in intent-longbox, a photo to listing pipeline that ended 2026-09-01 at v0.2.1 after eleven commits.
The research that preceded the build settled the architecture in one finding: LLM vision alone is not viable for issue-exact and variant-exact identification. Every incumbent that actually works in this space runs image-similarity retrieval against a reference cover corpus. The model is a ranker, never the source of truth.
So the pipeline puts the deterministic parts first.
barcode decode → candidate retrieval → LLM re-rank → human confirm → condition + price → Shopify draft
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