Blog
Engineering notes from 9io.
How we build products, AI systems and trading infrastructure — and what we learn on the way. Written by the people who do the work, with the sources linked.
Retrieval
Comparing FashionSigLIP, CLIP and DINOv2 for visual product search
On 60 real cases, FashionSigLIP put the right product in the top five 63% of the time, against 38% for CLIP and 23% for DINOv2. The pipeline and the test.
6 October 2026 · 9 min read AI engineeringGrounding a study assistant in live web search and the course itself
A web mode that never searched, an SDK that turned 429s into AttributeErrors, and the numbers from answering with a whole course in the context.
1 October 2026 · 11 min read AI engineeringWhy cosine similarity couldn’t decide which textbook topics to merge
Distinct topics scored 0.67 to 0.91 and reworded duplicates 0.70 to 0.94, so no threshold worked. How we merge topics when turning textbooks into courses.
1 September 2026 · 12 min read