How I built a three-tier content quality ladder for programmatic directory ETL (opens in new tab)

The three directory sites I launched in April — Top AI Tools, Find Games Like, and Open Alternative To — all generate editorial content the same way: fetch metadata from an external API, send it through Claude Haiku 4.5, write the result to Turso. But that description skips the part that actually matters for a programmatic site at scale: what happens when Claude can't run. The answer is a content quality ladder with three tiers, tracked by a single model_used column. The three tiers Every con...