Post 9 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. The flipbook from Post 8 knows which page you're on. Now we build the chat pipeline that answers questions about that page — and we make spoiler safety a property of the database query, not a line in the prompt. Build a RetrievalService whose Chroma filter is derived from server-side reading progress, wire it into a FastAPI chat endpoint, drive it with curl, and prove the boundary holds even when the user tries to jailbreak it. No chat UI yet — that's Post 10.

Post 8 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. Post 7 built two typed REST routes that return episode JSON with absolute image URLs; this post renders that data as a real page-flipping flipbook in the browser. A Vite + React + TypeScript frontend, a hand-rolled types.ts that mirrors the Pydantic models, an episode picker, and a wrapping StPageFlip — single page in portrait, two-page spread in landscape. Ends with appendices on the SQLAlchemy idioms behind the handlers and how Settings reads your .env.

Post 7 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. With one episode sitting in Postgres + LocalStorage from Post 5, it's time to surface it. Build two typed FastAPI routes — list episodes and episode detail — that resolve relative storage keys into absolute URLs at response time via the Storage Protocol, with the OpenAPI spec as the wire-format contract. By the end you have two endpoints returning episode JSON your browser can consume.

Post 6 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. Post 5 built the ingest-from-images skill that writes one JSON description per page; this post is the Stage-2 Python pipeline that consumes those JSONs — image variants via Pillow, uploads through the storage abstraction, pages and page_characters rows, a per-episode plot summary, and embedded chunks in ChromaDB's pages_v1 collection. By the end, one full episode is ingested end-to-end, with the two-stage design, the recovery story, and the reproduction recipe all walked through.

Post 5 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. The comic is images, not text — so before any RAG can happen, every page needs a description. This post is about who writes those descriptions: a tour of the three vision-provider options (local VLM, hosted API, Claude Code itself), why the Claude Code path wins for a portfolio project, and a section-by-section walk through the `ingest-from-images` skill that produces a JSON description per page. The right vision provider is context-specific, and the post includes a decision matrix mapping each constraint to the right choice — plus an appendix on how a VLM actually sees an image.

Post 4 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. Build three typed Protocol interfaces — Storage, EmbeddingClient, ChatClient — and the factory that picks the right implementation from a .env file. By the end you have LocalStorage serving images end-to-end and a working embedding client producing real 1024-dim vectors against the local Ollama you set up in Post 2.

Post 3 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. Post 2 stood up Postgres and applied the first migration; this post explains what that migration created and why. How Alembic works, why not Base.metadata.create_all(), how ten tables map one-to-one onto product features, four design decisions that pay off later, and a column-by-column tour of the SQLAlchemy 2.0 models.

Post 2 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series. Stand up the local workshop: Postgres in Docker, Ollama serving qwen2.5:7b and bge-m3, a typed FastAPI scaffold that passes mypy strict, the first Alembic migration, and one downloaded episode on disk. By the end you have the workshop every later post is built on.

Series introduction for the Pepper & Carrot AI-powered flipbook — a page-aware, spoiler-safe RAG app for a hand-drawn webcomic that runs locally on a laptop or on a five-piece free-tier cloud deploy. What it is, why it's a different problem from chat-with-PDF, and what each post in the series builds.

Applying Anthropic's Contextual Retrieval technique to personal photo libraries — where the notion of a "chunk" is a photo, not a paragraph.