Prototype to Production

I built a working AI prototype that could process PDFs perfectly. Then I tried to move it into production.

That's when I discovered OpenAI's API handles PDF processing completely differently than ChatGPT does. The prototype worked great in the interface, but the API? Not so much.

Turns out PDF handling was only added to OpenAI's API last month – and it's still pretty limited on file sizes. My prototype hit those constraints immediately.

I pivoted to Claude's API, which handles PDFs up to around 30MB. Problem solved, but it got me thinking about a bigger issue - always validate API capabilities early, even when the UI version works flawlessly. What works in conversation doesn't always translate to production code.

This isn't the first time I've hit this kind of mismatch. The gap between demo and deployment can be surprisingly wide.