I Built a Tiny AI Chatbot for My Side Project in a Weekend
You don't need a team or a budget to add a basic AI assistant to a small site. Here's the weekend version that worked.
I wanted a simple bot on my side-project site to answer the same five questions people emailed me. I expected it to take a month. It took a Saturday, and most of that was reading docs.
The core is smaller than people think: a prompt that explains your product, a way to send the user's message, and a place to show the reply. The model does the hard part. You do the guardrails.
Guardrails are the real work. I capped how long replies can get, told it to say "I don't know" instead of inventing, and kept it from touching anything private. Without those, it sounds smart and periodically lies.
I also fed it a short FAQ so it wasn't guessing from nothing. A bot with no context is just a confident stranger answering for your brand, which is worse than no bot.
Cost surprised me on the low side. A handful of questions a day barely registers against the free tier of most providers. The expensive part was my time, not the API.
If you build one, launch it small. Put it where a real person used to answer, watch what it gets wrong for a week, and fix the prompt. The bot gets better faster than you'd think once you see real questions.