Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff
Source: Hacker News
Background
I run a building‑design consultancy and got tired of paying Wix $40 / month for a brochure that couldn’t answer simple service questions, while I wasted hours handling the same FAQs. I shut it down and spent four months building a “talker”.
The stack is a bit of a hack: Netlify’s 10‑second serverless timeout forced me to split the agent into three pieces—Brain (Edge), Hands (Browser), and Voice (Edge). I haven’t coded in 30 years; this was three steps forward, two steps back, heavily guided by AI.
Proof of Concept
Two weeks ago a licensed architect tried to attack the bot to prove my business model harms the profession. The AI (DeepSeek‑R3) completely dismantled his arguments, responding with a hilariously caustic rebuttal.
Log of the exchange:
(log omitted)
Challenges (Battle Scars)
- Web Speech API works fine until someone speaks Chinese without toggling the language mode; it then spits out English phonetic gibberish.
- Liability is the killer. If the model hallucinates a building‑code clause, we’re dead—insurance won’t cover us.
- Intent handling was the hardest part: making a single LLM pivot seamlessly from a warm, principal‑like tone with a homeowner to a defensive “bulldog” when attacked by a peer. This took about 2.5 months of tuning.
Audit
We publish audit logs to keep ourselves honest and ensure the system stays hardened.
Audit log:
(audit details omitted)
Token Management
We burn through tokens with an “Eager RAG” hack (pre‑fetching guesses) to improve responsiveness.
Persistence Strategy
I ripped out the “essential” persistent databases—less than 5 % of visitors ever return, so we don’t bother storing sessions. If a client drops mid‑query, their session simply vanishes; there are no server‑side queues.
Goal
The point is to let me operate with a network of seasoned professionals while trimming the fat.
Try to break it. I’ll be in the comments.
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