Lessons from replacing a brittle chat integration with a lean, SSE-based LangChain flow Introduction: A simple stack Throughout my software development career, my focus has evolved from "architecture is most important" to "quality is everything" to "engineers are the backbone." While these views are different, they all share one common goal: building good software. But there has always been one aspect that adds the most cost to the product lifecycle: deployment and maintenance. A team can build one great product, but if the architecture does not account for deployment and maintenance, that team may never build a second product. It will just keep fighting fires. With that in mind, I started a new project to build an AI-integrated application that improves user workflows. The app must make decisions based on status, report information in a rich format, and provide a conversational interface. For this project, I set a strict constraint: minimize the surface area.…