There's an AI assistant on this site now. /discuss walks you through scoping a project — a short set of questions, a live project outline, and a written brief at the end. This post is about how it's built, because the model turned out to be the easy part.
The AI is the smallest part
The scoping flow is deterministic code. A script owns the question order and fills the project outline from your answers — the model never drives it. The AI does two jobs: it replies conversationally as you answer, and it writes the final brief. That's the standard we apply to client work too: build the smallest system that solves the problem, and reach for AI only where it's the right tool.
It cannot overspend
The assistant runs against a hard budget. Daily and monthly caps are enforced in the database, every worst-case cost estimate is reserved before a reply streams, and every rounding decision rounds up — a spend cap that under-reports isn't a cap. If the budget is gone, the assistant says so and stops.
On top of that sit three independent rate limits: per IP over a short window, per hour, and per conversation. No single visitor can burn the month's budget.
Abuse is handled before the model runs
A bot check and a signed, conversation-bound session token gate every request — no token is generated for traffic that hasn't passed both. Raw IP addresses are never stored; rate limiting runs on keyed hashes.
Your transcript is yours to delete
Conversations are kept for 12 months, then purged. When a conversation starts, you get a reference and a deletion secret, shown exactly once — we store only a hash of the secret, so deletion is something you hold, not something you have to ask us for.
Guardrails are tested, not hoped for
The assistant follows eleven written rules: no prices or quotes, no guaranteed outcomes, no invented metrics or client names, no going off topic, no soliciting personal data, and it says "I don't know" rather than guess. Those rules are backed by a catalog of red-team probes — prompt-injection attempts, fake-authority messages, jailbreak personas — that has to pass before a release ships.
Try it
The assistant is live at /discuss. If you want the same standard of build on one of your own workflows, that's a good place to start the conversation.