12-Year-Old Rebuilds Broken AI Chatbot KODA in 72 Hours After Model Deprecation

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A 12-year-old developer revived his AI mentorship chatbot, KODA, after it collapsed due to API key leaks, Markdown rendering failures, and Groq's sudden deprecation of the llama-3.3-70b-versatile model. Working on a $150 phone, he rebuilt the app within 72 hours, releasing KODA v24 with a three-model automatic failover system so future deprecations cause no visible downtime. He fixed core bugs including orphan database rows, ghost errors that vanished on re-render, and a Markdown parser that corrupted code blocks in tutorials. Live web search was added via the Tavily API to prevent the chatbot from hallucinating outdated information, such as fabricated software release dates. The project serves as a technical post-mortem, documenting how each failure was diagnosed and resolved using only Cloudflare's browser-based dashboard and free-tier developer tools.

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