Took me 5 hours to fix a simple AI chatbot training glitch at 3 AM

I was building a tiny customer service bot for a local bakery on Austin's east side, and it kept answering every question with a cookie recipe. Turns out I had a broken training data file that overwrote the intent mapping, and I only caught it after manually checking 200 lines of CSV on my phone. Five hours gone just because I didn't label the file "DO NOT USE" after an edit. Anyone else had a tiny data mistake eat up a whole day?

4 comments

4 Comments

casey2685d ago

Rose, that "BROKEN" prefix trick is a good one, but I wonder how you keep from accidentally training on the wrong file anyway. Do you rename the original file or save a separate copy with the label? I ask because I've seen folks get tripped up when they overwrite the original and end up with two copies of the same broken data. It might be worth setting up a separate folder for bad files so you never even see them in your working directory. That way you don't have to rely on memory or file names when you're running on two hours of sleep.

rose_clark815d ago

Renamed every bad training file with a "BROKEN" prefix after that, saved my butt last month when I accidentally reused one. Got into the habit of running a quick sanity check on the first 20 responses before walking away from a project. Sucks when one tiny mistake eats five hours but at least the bakery bot now only talks about cookies when it should.

the_robin5d ago

Five hours on a bakery bot? Isn't that overkill for some cookie talk?

taylor.brooke5d ago

Wait, so you're telling me you accidentally trained a bakery bot to ONLY talk about cookies and that's somehow a bad thing? lol sounds like you accidentally made it more focused than half the developers I know. But yeah, five hours of your life gone because you fed it the wrong file once - I've been there and it stings way worse than burning a batch of actual cookies. The sanity check trick is solid though, I started doing something similar after I trained a customer service bot to respond with "I'm sorry, Dave" to every single query and couldn't figure out why people kept complaining about 2001 references lmao.