How Swatcher builds a paint palette

How Swatcher turns a description or a photo into a palette of paints you can actually buy. Swatcher has had palette generation from the start. Describe a room, get some colours back, matched to real paints. With the rebuild I took the chance to turn it inside out. The old way was the obvious one. Ask a model for some hex codes, then find the nearest paint to each. It mostly worked. But nearest can be a long way off, and the model’s reasoning was written for a colour that doesn’t exist. Nobody can walk into a shop and buy #C8B8A2. So now there’s one rule: every colour Swatcher suggests is a real paint. The models never get to make one up. One reads what you wrote, the catalogue does the colour work, and another picks from a short list. That’s really it. Here’s how it hangs together. [embedded content: palette generation · 2 model calls, 3 outcomes after resolving] Two model calls, and neither one is ever the source of a colour: the reader only quotes, and the composer can only choose…