A week before my college's AI Expo, I was demoing my side project — a curated AI tool finder for students called AI Compass. I picked "Coding" as the goal. The wizard recommended Suno in the top 6. Suno makes AI music. It has nothing to do with coding. I checked the data file. Suno's category? "Coding" . So was Power BI. So was Loom. So was Discord, somehow. The catalog was lying. The shape of the problem AI Compass works simply: students answer 4 questions (goal, use case, budget, platform), and the wizard returns 5-6 tools with a one-line reason for each. The catalog had ~450 tools, each tagged into one category from a fixed list (Coding, Writing & Chat, Research, Productivity, Image Gen, Video Gen). The wizard had a strict hard-gate: pick goal=coding → only tools tagged "Coding" can surface. The gate worked. The data didn't. The midnight band-aid I had hours, not days. So I shipped a defense-in-depth fix instead of touching all 450 entries: a tag-based veto.…