Building ReadBuddy: why I killed the recommender and built a generator

When I started ReadBuddy, the obvious move was a recommendation library. Scrape good books, tag them, match users. I built the scraper, the tagger, the matching score. Six weeks in, it worked. And it was useless.

The real problem was never 'I can't find a book.' It was 'nothing fits how I feel tonight.' A recommender just surfaces more things that are almost right — the exact frustration I was trying to escape.

So I killed it. Deleted the branch. Replaced the whole idea with one sentence: you describe the mood, ReadBuddy writes the chapter. The first time the demo ran, I typed 'dark fantasy, multiple POVs, not too devastating' and got something I actually wanted to keep reading. That was the product.