Freshness as a First-Class Schema Concern: Modeling Data Staleness Across 83 Data Sources
I am not a developer, and I built a public reef atlas with AI agents. It pulls from 83 data sources that each update on their own schedule, some daily, some weekly, some once a decade. The hardest problem in the whole build was staleness, harder than the ocean science and harder than the frontend: how do you build a schema that tells the truth about how old each piece of data actually is, when the sources age so differently? The agents did more than write the code. They walked me through each sc

