Shipping salon-bot-dubai: what we learned operating it live

Trilingual customers. Booking edge cases. Mid-conversation language switches. Six months of running an AI receptionist for a real salon, with the numbers and the scars.

Full essay coming soon. This draft is being written from production notes — we'd rather ship the architecture first and the prose after.

Until then, the work itself is the argument. See salon-bot-dubai for the live deployment that informs every paragraph below.