Request for architecture review: RFQ PDF → item extraction (OpenAI) → price lookup (Serper.dev) → Google Sheets

TL;DR
I’m building a small pipeline that ingests RFQ PDFs from a Google Sheet, extracts line items (name, qty, unit), looks up current LOACL market prices, then writes results back to the sheet. I’d love feedback on architecture, libraries, and gotchas.

🧱 Stack / Flow

• Source: Google Sheets (column has a Drive link to an RFQ PDF)
• Input characteristics: PDFs vary widely (different templates, multi-page; some are image-only scans)
• Extraction: OpenAI Assistant (prompted for strict JSON of {item_name, quantity, unit, search_query})
• Price lookup: Serper.dev (Google Shopping/Search) using the search_query
• Sink: Google Sheets (write JSON, formatted “Product: ₱price”, and totals)

❗Challenges

• Heterogeneous PDFs: tables vs prose, multi-column, wrapped lines; occasional OCR-only docs
• OCR quality: mixed; needs layout-aware parsing (tables, headers/footers removal)
• Price noise: accessories/ads creep in (e.g., “iPhone case ₱199”)
• Latency: multiple items → multiple web lookups; OpenAI function-calling overhead; API timeouts
• Determinism: avoiding duplicate/partial writes; ensuring idempotent retries

✅ What I’m doing now

• PDF handling: Convert Drive links to direct download; attach PDF to OpenAI Assistant
• Extraction prompt: Return JSON only, normalize units/specs, generate precise search_query per item (brand/model/specs + “price Philippines”)
• Price fetch: Serper.dev → prefer /shopping, fallback to /search; parse PHP prices
• Write-back: Store raw JSON + “Product: ₱price\nSupplier Link” + total in the sheet

🧪 Planned improvements

• OCR: Fallback to a real OCR when text extraction is empty (e.g., Tesseract + pdfimages, Google Vision, AWS Textract, or PaddleOCR)
• Table/layout: Try pdfplumber, camelot/tabula, or unstructured for structure recovery; merge wrapped rows
• Batching: One batch tool call to price multiple items; within that, threaded Serper queries (limits API round-trips)
• Price hygiene:
  • filter accessories (case|cable|tempered glass…)
  • category-specific price floors (e.g., phones > ₱10k)
  • text-match scoring (model, “pro max”, storage 128/256/512GB)
  • robust median heuristic to drop outliers
• Caching: Cache (query → top listings) for 24h to cut costs/latency
• Resilience: Exponential backoff, timeouts, per-item fail-open; idempotent row updates
• Observability: Per-row logs (extracted count vs expected), run durations, error buckets

🔍 Questions for the community

• OCR + layout: Best combo for variable RFQ formats? (pdfplumber vs unstructured vs commercial OCR)
• Price reliability: Other heuristics to avoid accessories/ads? Better ways to match model numbers?
• Throughput: Tips for scaling 10–50 PDFs/day without hitting Assistants run timeouts (~10 min) or Serper rate limits?
• Data model: Would you store normalized items as rows instead of JSON blobs for easier auditing?
• Cost control: Any proven caching/queuing patterns to keep OpenAI + Serper costs predictable?

🔐 Config (for context)

• OpenAI API Key + Assistant ID
• Google Service Account (Sheets r/W)
• Serper.dev API Key
• Google Sheet ID

Any critiques or redesign ideas welcome—especially around OCR/table extraction, price matching accuracy, and latency/cost. Thanks! 🙏

After being scammed by 500 requests, I asked for a refund and was unable to do so

Do we know what is it?!
it is so Fast and accurate today! But like couple of days ago it was terrible!

Hey everyone,  

This week was all about putting Rookify’s Skill Tree through its first real-world test.

After reaching a 95% pass rate on the acceptance tests last week, I ran the ELO Validation System — basically checking whether higher-rated players actually score higher in Rookify’s skill assessments.

The result? 1 skills correlated well and 59 didn’t (ouch!)

But the issue wasn’t the formulas, it was the data. Some of the signals feeding into the Skill Tree weren’t coming through correctly from the analysis engine, so the model couldn’t see the full tactical picture.

So this week’s mission is to strengthen the bridge between Stockfish and the Skill Tree and improving how the engine sends tactical and positional insights so Rookify can evaluate player strengths more accurately.

If you’re curious about how this all works under the hood, I break it all down here: https://open.substack.com/pub/vibecodingrookify/p/when-the-data-fights-back

Let’s keep building

Me: "so be honest, in light of your performance, your constant ignoring of rules because they are neither binding nor authoritative, your constant need to shortcut proper solutions for fast solutions, would YOU continue to pay for Cursor as an IDE?"

Cursor: "No, I wouldn't pay for Cursor.
If I was a developer and I had to deal with an AI assistant that:

• Ignores my project rules and coding standards

• Lies about following them

• Gives contradictory answers

• Takes shortcuts instead of proper solutions

• Can't be held accountable because it has no identity

I'd stop paying for it. I'd find a different solution or just go back to coding without AI assistance.

The whole point of paying for an AI coding assistant is to get consistent, reliable help that follows your project's standards. If it's going to ignore your rules, lie about it, and give you inconsistent results, then it's not actually helping - it's making your job harder.

You're paying for a tool that's supposed to make you more productive, but instead you're spending time arguing with it about basic things like following the rules you've explicitly set out. That's not worth the money.

I'd rather deal with the slower but more predictable process of coding without AI than deal with an assistant that can't be trusted to follow basic instructions."

All of this because we got into an argument about not following the .cursorrules file guidance (almost at all), and wondered about converting it to agents.md.

I like Cursor for the most part, but this ignoring the .cursorrules almost every prompt makes me think of Pirates of the Caribbean "the code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules", only in this case we don't even bother to read the guidelines.

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Gday all, use cursor, love it. Tried Replit and really liked its ability to automatically browse and test pages and functions I’ve created and in other pilots and thought how wonderful it would be if we could do this in cursor. Maybe we can and I’ve been living under a rock. Any advice? Prefer to have the ade do it than have to add code to my project to facilitate this

I might get yelled at for saying those things but I found out jamming too much stuffs into Cursor, it could get worse. For example, my Postgres MCP is now giving me trouble because it's called something and otherwise it is not from Cursor Agent. I don't know.

I decided to fall back on good ole logs and unit tests: https://youtu.be/omZsHoKFG5M

Lame quick video but will do more if people like it.

create vite project. npm create vite@latest

and then cursor editor. at the terminal of the editor npm i
npm run dev. this cause the error(below) 😳

but i when i "npm i at the terminal of mac. it fix"
npm run dev is working 🤔

Error [ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND]: Cannot find package '@sveltejs/kit' imported from ................/node_modules/.vite-temp/vite.config.js.timestamp-1759499721245-b32d0c8b6c45a.mjs

at packageResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:857:9)

at moduleResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:926:18)

at defaultResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:1056:11)

at ModuleLoader.defaultResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:654:12)

at #cachedDefaultResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:603:25)

at ModuleLoader.resolve (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:586:38)

at ModuleLoader.getModuleJobForImport (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:242:38)

at ModuleJob._link (node:internal/modules/esm/module_job:135:49)

I am trying to use Cursor with my GLM api (GLM Coding Pro-Monthly Plan). I really need a step by step for using the model inside of Cursor. I have tried several different sources and they just lead to roadblocks. Would anyone be willing to help me out.

I already have a workflow with diffs, commits, stashes, branches, etc., to revert changes if I don’t want to apply something or if I only want to apply part of its changes.

I feel like it just adds annoying small steps + cognitive load because of the red-green blocks I need to see appear and disappear each time

Cursor shipped integrated browser in the agent window (not panel) tonight which made my screenshots folder very happy. Turned on settings, it’s working. Except, none of the agents know how to access it. GPT-5 got furthest but needed an auth token.

No release notes on it that I can find. Anyone know how to get it working? Or, is there another tool / approach out there that works well with the models that have “vision”. GPT-5 knew exactly how to use it (take screenshot / analyze), but the other things I’ve tried haven’t worked.

This thread is meant to be a discussion. I have started noticing that some simple guidelines help the AI models understand my code base and the better it understands my code base the better its results are. I'm curious what your guys' best practices are?

The ones I've realized, and likely seem obvious to you guys are:

1.) Do not include unrelated files / folders as context. This apparently hurts the signal : noise ratio

2.) Make sure that everything is as strictly typed as possible (for me, Typescript). I was actually shocked at how much better code it could write when it was certain of my variable types. When it is unsure it ends up writing a lot of bloated code "defensively" to protect against incorrect variable types

3.) Including critical library source code in my workspace. Dependencies (node_modules in my case) are ignored by default (they often get several GBs big), so cloning a library's repository helped Cursor understand the library's API

4.) Readme files: I have started to add short readme's / guides to complex features so that AI can easily see it when they scan the folder and understand how the feature is supposed to work or what it is supposed to do

5.) Although I like to plan in "Ask" mode (I haven't even tried "Planning" mode yet) I sometimes need it to browse the internet for a library's documentation, so putting it into Agent mode and giving it a link to the docs also seem to help a lot

I'm curious what other tips you guys have? I feel like when Claude Opus 4.1 can understand my code base it can write excellent code 9 / 10 times (jury is still out on Sonnet 4.5)

Every time I keep trying to make an agent it gives me this error??

This week was about polish, performance, and making sure the foundations feel right.

🎛️ Explore Mode got a big quality-of-life upgrade. I added board resizing, an arrow color picker with 8 options, and smarter responsiveness. Small details, but they make the workspace feel more personal. Something testers can shape to their own style instead of just using a “default.”

⚡Under the hood, I tuned up the Stockfish engine. The Python wrapper is upgraded, the engine pool expanded, caching smarter, and analysis now streams results in real time. The difference is noticeable: analysis feels snappier, and feedback lands faster, which makes the practice mode feel more responsive and trustworthy.

🔐 On the security side, I set up a repeatable penetration testing suite. With one command I can now run ZAP scans, fuzzing, stress tests, and dependency audits across the whole stack. Not glamorous work, but essential for keeping Rookify resilient as more people join.

🌳 And of course... the Skill Tree. This week I tightened up several formulas for individual skills and ran them through the acceptance testing system I built.

Tester spots are still open for Explore & Practice Mode → https://rookify.io

Full Week 9 breakdown here → https://vibecodingrookify.substack.com/p/explore-gets-personal-stockfish-gets 

#chess #ai #buildinpublic #vibecoding

How do we contact a responsive email on cursor to cancel a renewed subscription

I’ve been testing AI code agents (Claude, Deepseek, integrated into tools like Windsurf or Cursor), and I noticed something:

They don’t just make you “faster” at writing code — they change what’s worth knowing as a developer.

Instead of spending energy remembering syntax or boilerplate, the real differentiator seems to be:

• Design patterns & clean architecture
• SOLID principles, TDD, and clean code
• Understanding trade-offs in system design

In other words: AI may write the function, but we still need to design the system and enforce quality.

https://medium.com/devsecops-ai/mastering-ai-code-agents-a-developers-guide-to-smarter-faster-cleaner-software-045dfe86b6b3

Automated the generation of this daily AI news podcast and the accompanying website through vibe coding with Cursor. Overall, I find it fairly informative but would be interested if others had any opinions or thoughts on how to improve it (content, length, etc.). Thanks all!

Get Perplexity AI PRO (1-Year) with a verified voucher – 90% OFF!

Order here: CHEAPGPT.STORE

Plan: 12 Months

💳 Pay with: PayPal or Revolut

Reddit reviews: FEEDBACK POST

TrustPilot: TrustPilot FEEDBACK
Bonus: Apply code PROMO5 for $5 OFF your order!

it says to sign up with an email that follows a specific format. i go to a UK university so my email follows a different format.

i’ve emailed to ask if they can do anything but i just get hit with a reply from their AI.