Stop Building To-Do Lists: How My Passion Project for Web Novels Taught Me AI Engineering

The author argues against building generic AI portfolio projects like PDF chatbots, sharing how they built FableWeaver.ai—an AI platform for writing interactive web novels where characters maintain lore across hundreds of chapters. The core engineering challenge was overcoming LLM context window limitations (the "Goldfish Effect"), solved by implementing a three-tier layered summary system (world lore, arc summaries, chapter recaps) instead of basic RAG.