20 posts tagged with "AI and Machine Learning"

Or: how three years of infrastructure and three months of civic AI led us to the Dead Poets Society — and why the yawps are about to begin

Three near-zero-cost interventions that improved our civic RAG pipeline more than any model change could

How a single false correction revealed the need for local geographic authority in AI pipelines

How TRIZ and Theory of Constraints guided us from a 120-second timeout to a zero-LLM first pass

A hybrid approach that uses regex for transcripts, LLMs for general documents, and NLP guardrails for validation

A global lock pattern that makes local AI as reliable as cloud AI—without the costs or data concerns

The daily practice of challenging AI prompts with messy, real-world data

"It looks impossible - but it's a hackathon. Cheers!"

This is the story of OCapistaine, a civic transparency AI built during the Encode "Commit to Change" Hackathon. It's a story of blocked pipelines, strategic pivots, 4,000 municipal PDFs, and the belief that AI can help citizens understand their local democracy.

Spoiler: We shipped it. Barely.

Sprint planning call between Johnny (@jnxmas) and Victor (@zcbtvag) to align on the Sunday midnight deadline. Key decision: pivot to Mistral Document AI + Batch + Agent for a rapid RAG prototype.

Call Goals​

• Align on immediate priorities before Sunday midnight
• Decide RAG approach and OCR path
• Clarify repo/branch workflow and submodule handling
• Assign ownership for Mistral Document AI setup
• Coordinate API keys and cost management

How Ò Capistaine builds trust with citizens and civil servants through measurable AI reliability