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Shipping a practical AI assistant (without the hype)
How I build AI tooling that people actually use — the same approach behind the assistant on this site.
Most AI features are demos. The ones worth shipping do one job reliably and get out of the way. That's the bar I hold myself to.
Start from the task
The assistant on this site doesn't try to be everything. It answers questions about my work, sessions and store, and it points you to the right page. That's it — and that's enough.
Pluggable by design
It runs on a built-in knowledge base with zero keys, but it can hand off to an LLM or a private backend the moment one is configured. No rewrite, just an environment variable.
Ship the smallest useful thing, then let it earn the next feature.