DEV Community

Simply Learn - An AI-First LMS with Next.js 16 & Xano

Arya Pratap Singh on December 13, 2025

This is a submission for the Xano AI-Powered Backend Challenge: Full-Stack, AI-First Application. For Detailed Demo and my thoughts while Building...

Read full post

rokoss21 • Dec 13 '25

Excellent full-stack implementation! The AI tutor powered by Gemini is the key differentiator here. One thing worth thinking about as this scales:

Contracts between frontend and AI tutor backend become critical for reliability. Here's the challenge:

When a student asks the AI tutor a question, you need:

Deterministic response format — tutor always returns {response_text, confidence, links_to_lessons}
Rate limiting + fallback — What if Gemini is slow? Frontend needs to know
Validation — Never render an invalid response to a student
Streaming contract — If you stream responses (MUX-style), define chunks as contracts

As it stands, if Gemini returns malformed JSON or unexpected fields, the frontend could break mid-lesson. This is especially risky in an educational context where reliability matters.

Something like FACET could help here:

Define tutor response schema formally (not just in comments)
Validate all Gemini outputs against that schema before streaming to frontend
Type-safe contracts between Xano (backend) and Next.js (frontend)
Logged & versioned so you can replay lessons deterministically

Great execution on the full stack—would be interested to see how the AI tutor feedback loop evolves as you get real students using it!

Arya Pratap Singh • Dec 13 '25

Surely I understand and agree with all your points. If I move to scale this after the challenge I'll surely look for all the points you mentioned. But yes it would also need architectural changes as well like redis/memdb for caching and cdns for images etc.

Thanks for the Feedback