Image to Caption

Sometimes the most interesting engineering problem isn't the AI feature itself — it's making sure a free public tool doesn't fall over the moment it gets popular, or gets targeted.

The Idea

Upload a photo, get a caption back — powered by an external AI captioning provider rather than a self-hosted model. Simple on the surface.

The Real Work

The actual engineering effort went into production hardening: keeping the service snappy under sudden traffic spikes, and resilient against automated denial-of-service attempts aimed at knocking it offline. Rate limiting and abuse detection were built directly into the request path.

• Third-party AI captioning integration
• Rate limiting and abuse detection baked into the request path
• Shipped as its own standalone public site

The Result

A lean, resilient utility that anyone can drop a photo into and get a caption back almost instantly — small tool, built to survive the internet.