I found my way again.
That anxiety that starts to grow when you see the end approaching.
We were getting close to mid-August and I felt completely stuck, but I was not able to ask for the help I needed. No matter how much I refined my agents, no matter how much I redesigned my activities to give them a better structure, the LLMs were not giving me, not even close, the answers I needed. Moving pieces around in the agents, without a framework, felt a little tortuous, because I had to keep all the threads connected while preserving the right logic.
But all of this was going to change magically in the next mentoring session:
Mentors: "How are you doing, Carol?"
Carol: "Terribly. Nothing works. I cannot get any useful or differentiating answer that represents a real gain, etc."
Mentors: "Ok, don't worry, let's see what you have. What framework are you working with, and with which models?"
Carol, beginning to want to disappear: "Well... it's just that... look, CrewAI gave me a lot of problems with Ollama... so in the end, I am running the agents without a framework... And the models, well, these ones. I had several: qwen, a mistral, a gemma..."
Ismael, taking a deep breath: "Let's see, Carolina... you write to me about the quantum thing... and not about this? We are going to unblock the dependency problems so you can use CrewAI right now. What you have built is not giving you better answers not because you need to improve the code, but because at this point you need larger models that can complete more of the information for you, so we are going to unblock that as well."
Thanks to him and to David Ibáñez, to whom I will be eternally grateful, we were able to use ChatLiteLLM as an abstraction and CrewAI worked for me. With one huge prompt, we were able to migrate all the code created without a framework to CrewAI very easily. So, with that, I started working on connecting to an API. I chose Gemini Flash because it was fast, inexpensive, and good enough.
And... voilà! The answers started to become acceptable. They were not perfect, but they covered the minimum I had required them to meet. I could not believe it! Had I really done it? Was it a functional MVP? Well, yes, it was. Did it still have flaws? Yes, it did, but after the heavy work, refining the details and smoothing the rough edges becomes much more manageable. I felt tremendously proud of it.
With that, all that remained was to bring it to a front end, something simple to visualize the work in a friendly way. I chose Streamlit because it is Python code. At that point, I needed to stay on familiar ground.
Breathing
The summer was coming to an end, and with it, a wonderful journey of learning, not only academic, but also personal.
In the interface I finally presented in Vigo, you can select the target classroom and view the students' profiles to see their main characteristics. With a very simple prompt such as "generate a math game in which we use balls", for example, it generates a complete activity, with objectives, adaptations, task distribution by phases, time for each phase, and even an assessment rubric, since teachers often find it difficult to know how to assess activities.
Teachers do not need to study prompt engineering or iterate for hours to achieve the expected result. By using simple prompts, and without losing the possibility of iterating for changes, they can have complete activities ready in short periods of time, activities they can develop on Monday morning and that meet the curricular needs of a specific classroom.
I took many things with me that summer, things that do not appear in the commits, and among them there is someone who accompanied me throughout my journey in a special way and whom I would not like to leave unmentioned. In a demanding environment, one person gave me empathy, understanding, and constant words of encouragement with all the tenderness she carries: that person is Mariel.
Without her, reaching the end of my journey after losing my maps might probably have led me to failure or to giving up, which I admit I did consider at some moments of unease and exhaustion.
I cannot fail to thank my mentors, both for their technical guidance and patience and for their human and emotional support.
And... that was my summer journey! If you made it this far, thank you very much for sharing this enriching experience with me.
I hope that if you are thinking of applying for a scholarship, you enjoy the journey as much as I did.
Best wishes!