Disciplefy

Problem

Bible study guide generation needed to work for anonymous visitors (low friction, try before signing up) and signed-in users (higher usage caps), across three languages, without one AI provider outage taking the whole feature down. Separately, the companion blog needed a steady stream of multilingual posts without hand-writing each one.

Architecture

Flutter client with Supabase Edge Functions as the study-guide backend. AI generation calls OpenAI GPT-3.5 first, falls back to Claude Haiku, then to static mock data if both providers fail — the feature degrades instead of erroring. Access control differentiates anonymous (rate-limited) from OAuth (Google/Apple) sessions at the edge-function layer, backed by Row Level Security on Postgres. A separate Rust service (Axum + SQLx + Tokio) serves the blog API and runs the content pipeline: a cron job picks a learning-path topic missing locale coverage, streams a generated study guide per locale from the same Supabase edge function via SSE, formats it into localized markdown, and publishes it as a blog post — with a retry cron for partial failures and admin endpoints to trigger generation or hot-reload schedules on demand.

Key decisions

• Three-tier AI fallback chain (GPT-3.5 → Claude Haiku → mock data): treats provider outages as expected, not exceptional — the feature stays usable in degraded mode instead of failing outright.
• Different rate limits for anonymous (3/hr) vs OAuth (30/hr): lets people try the product with zero signup friction while keeping AI-cost exposure bounded per class of user.
• Blog generation as a separate Rust service instead of more Edge Functions: cron scheduling, concurrency guards, and admin control fit a long-running process better than the request/response model Edge Functions are built for.
• Reused the same study-guide generation pipeline for blog content instead of a separate content pipeline: one source of AI-generation logic to maintain, not two.

Results

Live product at disciplefy.in supporting English, Hindi, and Malayalam, running on both anonymous and OAuth access tiers across iOS, Android, and Web, with a self-sustaining multilingual blog publishing on a daily cron.