Two Hours vs. One Question
What If The Best Architecture Decisions Are The Ones You Don't Make?
I just spent two hours planning how to reorganize my codebase to add a new feature completely. Then I ask myself one question that made me realize I was about to create a mess for no reason.
Here's what happened.
The Thing That Started This Whole Journey
I've developed an AI podcast system that processes over 915 episodes, performs voice recognition, and more. I also wanted to add LangChain to create a query API, allowing me to ask questions about the content and receive AI-powered answers, just like any other chatbot.
Started sketching out this whole migration plan where I would move the ETL pipeline to an etl/ folder. Create a new langchain_api/ folder. Set up shared models. Docker compose files ... everything.
But wait, it gets better (worse?).
Because I'm not just moving files around, right? This is an AI system with:
- 33 voice fingerprints trained over 2+ months
- Cross-episode memory that knows when guests return
- ML models with specific PyTorch versions compiled for exact hardware
- 12,000+ confidence reports that the system uses for quality control
My migration plan developed into a detailed document outlining everything. I use several prompts for inspiration to ensure that I do it correctly and maintain a robust codebase.
I was feeling pretty smart about all this complexity I was handling.
After reviewing everything, I asked myself: "Why can't the LangChain API just go in your existing api/ folder?"
I literally had an api/ folder. Right there. With one file in it.
Makes me wonder what other simple questions I'm not asking myself.