Short write‑ups of problems we hit running a real commerce operation and what we changed in the code because of them. No product announcements; just the reasoning.
We replaced a third-party storefront search with our own — Typesense, typo tuning measured against real queries, synonyms shared across fourteen languages, merchandising boosts for staff, a hybrid semantic arm tuned with a harness instead of a hunch — and then turned the queries that found nothing into a shopping list for the buyers. Total AI spend for the whole programme: about six cents.
The search box in the staff app finds a customer, an order, a pallet, a mailshot, an employee, a chat message — forty‑two model types — scoped to what you may see, typo‑tolerant, in one keystroke. How it runs on Typesense next to the application, why three places must change in lockstep when a new thing becomes searchable, the reindex command that rebuilds a section while people keep working, and the afternoon the search engine's raft log got stuck.