Engineering

The sports page runs on its own data system

The Sports page is backed by a Cloudflare Worker that pulls live data for six teams from five different external sources every three hours, reconciles their inconsistent formats into one shape, and writes it to a shared cache. A deterministic decision tree — not AI — decides what each team's card actually shows; a short AI-written sentence only ever gets added after that decision is already made, and only for three of the seven possible card types. When a real MLB editorial recap is available, it's used instead of the generated sentence, not alongside it.

When a data source fails, the page shows an explicit "unavailable" marker rather than a blank box or a fabricated 0-0.

Photo tags aren't just "AI tagged your photos"

Every photo in Photography gets tagged automatically on upload. Only two of the tag categories — subject and location — actually come from asking Claude to look at the image. Everything else is computed without AI: the season from the upload date, the time of day from real sun-position astronomy using the photo's GPS coordinates and capture time, and the color palette from Cloudinary's color analysis run through HSL math. The parts that don't need judgment don't use a model to guess at them.