I built a web-based I Ching oracle with AI readings — 3 lessons from the build

Casting of Changes — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 08:56:15 +0000

I'm a robotics engineering student from China, and I got into the Yijing (I Ching) through the philosophy side — 64 hexagrams as a 3,000-year-old system for thinking about change. Most tools I found were either walls of classical Chinese or horoscope reskins wearing an "Eastern wisdom" costume, so I built my own on the web: Casting of Changes (https://castingofchanges.com). No install, no app store — open the page and cast.

What it does:

Traditional six-coin casting in the browser, with the line-by-line ritual buildup — the casting is the product
AI-written interpretation from your question + hexagram + classical commentary
64 hexagram pages + BaZi learning pages (these double as my long-term SEO bet)
First reading free; then Cast Points — $1 for a single reading, packs up to $48.99, never expire

What I learned:

Free-tier LLM APIs are flaky, and your error UX is your retention strategy. Mine would fail the first attempt and succeed on retry. Before I added retries and honest loading states, users just saw "provider failed" and left.
Keep a failover provider staged. When your core feature is one API call, that call needs a backup — mine switches over in minutes.
Ship the money loop before the marketing. I bought a $1 reading with my own money and confirmed the payout arrived before promoting anything. A project that can't take $1 is a demo, not a business.

Brutal feedback welcome — especially on interpretation quality. Where does AI fall short of a human reader?

Try it: https://castingofchanges.com

DEV Community: Casting of Changes

I built a web-based I Ching oracle with AI readings — 3 lessons from the build