Built a Client Report Agent: The Model Was the Smallest Part of the Job
AmbassadorSad3889 · reddit · 2026-08-27
A developer's retrospective on building an "AI report generator" for a client: roughly 80% of the effort went into inputs — the client's data lived in three places with mismatched labels, missing fields and duplicates, and no prompt fixes garbage inputs, it just produces fluent reports built on bad numbers. Once the upstream data was normalized, the report-writing prompt became almost trivial.
Another surprise: the client wanted identical-looking weekly reports, which is a templating job, not a creative one. The author locked the structure with a fixed template and only let the model fill narrative sections and flag anomalies. Takeaway: a report generator is mostly a data pipeline with a thin language layer on top.
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