Building a passwordless, Gemini-advised dashboard on the "zero stack"

Short summary

Kajota Pulse is a serverless Bloomberg-style dashboard helping African micro-commerce co-sellers decide weekly inventory using Vercel, AWS Aurora, and Gemini 2.5 Flash for AI recommendations. The post reveals three critical non-obvious engineering challenges: passwordless IAM database authentication on Aurora Serverless, MongoDB change-stream event ordering, and Lambda credential shadowing. Solutions like structured Gemini JSON outputs with deterministic fallbacks and live production data integration are broadly applicable patterns for production AI-advisory systems.

• •Kajota Pulse: serverless inventory-recommendation dashboard for African co-sellers built on Vercel, Aurora, Gemini
• •Three key engineering challenges: passwordless IAM auth, MongoDB change-stream event ordering, Lambda credential shadowing
• •Reusable patterns: structured AI outputs with fallbacks, live production data integration, passwordless database architecture

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