Debug silent ASR failure in Gradio read-along app
Takeaway: Next time I'd paste the log and ask directly for exception logging around the ASR wrapper instead of first asking 'what's happening,' since that's exactly what we ended up doing anyway.
Stack · 9 sessions
faster-whisper sessions with coding agents
9 sessions on faster-whisper with a coding agent: the agent failed at least once in 6, and 3 finished without a human stepping in.
Polish README and hackathon submission docs for Read-Along AI (Gradio)
Takeaway: Next time I'd flag the .gitignore rule on .hackathon/submission up front so the agent checks tracked status before writing handoff files there, since I nearly lost those prompts silently.
Update docs to reflect curriculum-audio local TTS path
Takeaway: Next time I'd bundle the doc-consistency check into the original implementation prompt instead of asking for it separately, since the docs drift as soon as behavior changes.
Get Off the Grid local inference badge-ready on a HF Space
Takeaway: Next time I'd lead with the Space's hard constraints (1GB repo limit, free-tier build memory, no CUDA) before letting the agent draft a plan, since two of our failures were pure packaging/build issues we could have anticipated upfront.
Untangle git branches and benchmark word-boundary detection for Read-Along AI
Takeaway: Next time I'd start by telling the agent explicitly not to commit anything without asking, since it committed twice before I stepped in to stop it.
Fix VoxCPM word-click audio cache leaks and build a labeled boundary benchmark
Takeaway: Next time I'd start by asking for a ground-truth labeling workflow and benchmark harness before building any alignment logic, since that's what actually let us tell good methods from bad ones.
Add word-level alignment for VoxCPM word-click playback
Takeaway: Next time I'd specify upfront that word clips must not bleed into adjacent words, since that was the real bug hiding behind 'alignment isn't better' — the fix was clamping word end to the next word's start plus much smaller padding for aligned clips versus the proportional fallback.
Wire up word-click TTS in Gradio read-along app
Takeaway: Next time I'd open with the fact that TTS needs to work instantly for a kid clicking words, not just eventually — that would have surfaced the Modal cold-start problem before I burned time on Gradio 6 launch-arg compatibility.
Add local GGUF inference path and hybrid Modal/local toggle for read-along app
Takeaway: Next time I'd ask for the environment sanitization (Conda vs .venv Torch conflicts) to be handled up front, since that same libtorch_python.so issue bit me twice, once during GGUF conversion and again during local_inference.py testing.