Reliability on Ergophobia

spanish-academy — week of 2026-08-17

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

One change this week, but a significant one: the assistant can now be switched into a mode where it hands every conversation straight to a live person instead of answering.

This isn’t a retreat from the automated path. It’s the escape hatch I should have built earlier. The last few weeks have been a steady run of the assistant getting a detail wrong in front of a customer — a schedule, an age rule, a price — and each time the only lever I had was to patch the specific case and redeploy. Now there’s a single switch that takes the machine out of the loop entirely while I fix whatever broke, and it can be flipped without shipping code.

spanish-academy — week of 2026-08-10

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

The busiest week in a while, and most of it was about pulling judgement out of the model and into data.

Age eligibility was the clearest case: the assistant had been reasoning its way to whether a student qualified for a given course, and it was reasoning wrong. It now looks the answer up. In the same vein, I took a batch of rulings from the business side — how to handle private-lesson pricing, what the adult age boundaries actually are, and a workshop date that had gone stale — and encoded them rather than leaving them to interpretation.

Ollie — week of 2026-08-03

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

A heavy week, mostly reliability.

Startup ordering was wrong: the server waited on pipeline recovery before it would answer anything, so a restart with a backlog looked like an outage. It now serves first and recovers behind that, with a real HEALTHCHECK so the container’s state is honest. Two more crashes went away — MCP sessions were expiring after five minutes, and a panicking worker could take the whole pipeline down with it. Cancelling or completing one trip could also strand its load in in_transit while a sibling trip was still open; that’s fixed, as is previewing text and markdown blobs in Fleet.