Mixtape

Inspiration

Telling a friend "you should watch this" rarely lands. You pick what you love, not what they'd love from your shelf. We wanted a small, personal gift: three of my favourites, chosen for you, with a note from me.

What it does

You add favourite films, books and artists, plus a few things your friend likes. The agent asks Qloo which of your favourites connect to their taste and picks three. Each pick comes with a plain reason ("A love of Bon Iver led here") and something concrete to start with, like a trailer, a first chapter or one track. You add a note and send a link. Your friend opens a package, sees the three pieces with your notes, can swap anything they already know for another of your favourites, and can make one back. No accounts.

How we built it

Qloo does the taste work. We resolve every title and artist with Qloo search, then rank only the sender's own favourites against the recipient's tastes with the Insights API. The agent is Claude Haiku 5.5 running a bounded tool loop through the AI SDK. It decides which Qloo calls to make, reads the results, retries when a category comes back empty, and writes the one-line reason. It can't add items that aren't on the sender's shelf or override Qloo's ranking. "Why this?" shows the Qloo evidence behind every pick, and a comparison view shows what changes with and without Qloo.

The app is Next.js 16 on Bun, hosted on ShipTiffin with Postgres and Valkey. A release step warms the demo samples on deploy. Spend and quota limits keep a public demo safe: a few Qloo calls per run, a daily model cap, and rate limits per visitor.

Challenges

Real Qloo data surprised us. Some well-known titles resolve to the wrong edition, and some results aren't suitable for a general audience, so we added identity checks and a content filter for the samples. We also had to keep the agent honest: it explains connections Qloo actually returned, not ones it imagines.

What we're proud of

Swapping a piece the recipient already knows takes one tap and keeps the rest of the gift intact. The reasons read like something a friend would say, and each one traces back to real Qloo evidence.

What's next

Group gifts for birthdays and leaving cards, and a weekly "send one back" ritual between two people.

Built With

• ai-sdk
• anthropic
• bun
• claude-haiku
• next.js
• postgresql
• qloo
• react
• shiptiffin
• typescript
• valkey