PolyStack Taste Gate

Inspiration

Hackathon judges want agents that only work because they know what people love. Generic LLM recommenders invent culture. We wanted the opposite: refuse when the taste signal is weak.

What it does

PolyStack Taste Gate turns audience seeds (brands, films, artists, places) into cultural references with Qloo entity receipts:

1. Locate — resolve seeds via Qloo /search
2. Diagnose — affinity candidates via /v2/insights
3. Apply or Refuse — propose references with entity IDs, or refuse with a clear reason when insights are empty/weak

No hallucinated culture. If Qloo cannot ground the recommendation, the agent stops.

How we built it

Thin FastAPI adapter + static UI. Server-side X-Api-Key only against https://hackathon.api.qloo.com. Fixture mode keeps the demo runnable while the hackathon API key is issued. Pipeline mirrors our Architect verbs (Locate → Diagnose → Apply/Refuse).

Challenges

API keys arrive by email (business days). We shipped a public repo + fixture demo first so judges can inspect the refuse path immediately, then flip to live Qloo when the key lands.

What fails without Qloo

Without the taste graph there is no cultural grounding — Taste Gate must refuse. That is the product, not a bolted-on recommender.

Built With

• agents
• fastapi
• javascript
• python
• qloo