Building a school-assignment assistant for my daughter

Building a private school-assignment assistant for one child: scraping a portal with no API, an LLM that learns to discard, cached summaries, a small agent, and knowing what it costs.

Why I built a school-assignment app for my daughter

Clicking 12 subject tabs every night to find one due date? Here's why I built a school portal assignment tracker for my daughter instead.

Scraping a school portal with no API: dropping the browser for raw HTTP

Scraping a school portal with no public API: why I dropped Playwright for Node's built-in https module, a plain cookie jar, and regex parsing.

Teaching an LLM to ignore the recap and surface the homework

Teacher notes are mostly recap, not actions. Learn how to prompt an LLM to extract action items only and ignore past events.

Parent-friendly summaries without paying the LLM twice

Regenerating LLM summaries on every page load wastes money and time. Learn how a derived cache key makes LLM summary caching effortless.

Ask the app: a Q&A agent over a kid's school year

How I built a bounded LLM agent to answer open-ended questions over a child's school year, with three SQL tools and a hard four-iteration ceiling.

Tracking what the LLM costs in a one-person app

Slow token leaks hit harder than one big call. Learn how a single wrapper and use-case tags make tracking LLM API costs a query, not a monthly surprise.