I Built an AI That Recommends Therapy Animals — Here's the Surprisingly Simple Tech Stack

I Built an AI That Recommends Therapy Animals — Here's the Surprisingly Simple Tech Stack Everyone builds AI chatbots. I built one that figures out whether you need a golden retriever or a guinea pig. Spoiler: the architecture is embarrassingly simple — and it works. The Problem I Was Actually Solving Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is genuinely evidence-backed. Multiple studies show meaningful reductions in anxiety, depression, and stress when people interact with animals. But matching someone to the right animal type? That was still a phone call with a specialist, a 2-week wait, and a $200 intake session. I thought: this first-level triage is a classification problem. Let's build it. The Tech Stack (nothing fancy, I promise) FastAPI (backend) OpenAI GPT-4o-mini (the actual brain) Pydantic v2 (data validation) Simple JSON config (the animal knowledge base) Vercel (deploy in 3 minutes) No vector DB. No RAG pipeline. No Kubernetes. Just a well-engineered prompt and clean data. The Core: T