How I Built an AI Document Ingestion Pipeline

Symport is an AI document ingestion pipeline that turns a phone photo of any paper document — receipt, EOB, prescription, utility bill — into structured JSON, then stores it in Postgres with embeddings for semantic search. The full flow is: image upload → Sharp preprocessing → GPT-4o vision extraction → normalized JSON → Postgres + pgvector. I built it because I hate paper and I also lose paper. This post walks through how the pipeline actually works, including the prompt engineering decisions t