Accept, accept, nothing works

Severo’s web prototype worked, so he decided to move everything at once: Flutter for cross-platform, Firebase auth, Firestore, cloud functions, storage for audio (a lovely reason: users should someday hear their month-one French against their month-two French ▸ 4:05). Cline generated the entire migration and he approved it on vibes: “yo sí, aceptar, aceptar, así me gusta… y cuando termina, no funciona nada” ▸ 5:14. The Android emulator crashed every two seconds; he retreated to web to get a fast test loop back ▸ 6:44.

Two portable lessons come out of the wreckage. First, the model-name gaslight: LLMs trained on 2023-24 data keep “correcting” gemini-2.5-flashlite to 1.5, or insisting native audio input doesn’t exist and proposing a transcript pipeline, which for a pronunciation teacher “no sirve para nada” ▸ 7:53. When responses suddenly go incoherent, check whether your assistant quietly downgraded your model string.

cuando nada funciona, construye la app más pequeña que reproduzca una sola cosa →

Second, the recovery method after a lost day on silent, “corrupt” audio that no package, no Context7 docs, no GPT could fix: stop debugging inside the big app. Build a new application whose only feature is recording audio ▸ 10:49, iterate there, and the culprit surfaces: the format, working only as .mp4 of all things (NotebookLM, Julia notes, exports audio as mp4 too ▸ 11:44). It’s the naked-prototype instinct turned inward: when the system is too big to interrogate, make a smaller system that can only fail in one way. Deadline pressure supplies the moral: a week and a half to the Shipaton, so the eyes get simplified and the yolo migrations end here…