Notes from building AI products in the open: memory systems, validation before building, and what the marketing pages don't admit. There is also Radar — a generated, unedited daily scan of what moved in AI tooling.
Language models fabricate figures silently. Here is an architecture that makes that impossible by construction: numbers extracted by code, a model that never sees a value, a verification gate. Built in one night on an 8B local model, with a live demo.
Honest comparison of Mem0, Zep, Letta, and Smara — verified April 2026 pricing, tradeoffs the marketing pages don't admit, and a decision framework.
I shipped a product to the graveyard before it shipped to customers. The four-minute validation habit I've now made permanent.