Hacker NewsI run a building design consultancy. I got tired of paying Wix $40/month for a brochure that couldn’t answer simple service questions, and me wasting hours on the same FAQs.
So I killed it all and spent 4 months building a 'talker': https://axoworks.com
The stack is completely duct-taped: Netlify’s 10s 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 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, heavily guided by AI.
The fight that proved it worked: 2 weeks ago, a licensed architect attacked the bot, trying to prove my business model harms the profession. The AI (DeepSeek-R3) completely dismantled his arguments. It was hilariously caustic.
Log: https://logs.axoworks.com/chat-architect-vs-concierge-v147.h...
A few battle scars:
* Web Speech API works fine, right up until someone speaks Chinese without toggling the language mode. Then it forcefully spits out English phonetic gibberish. Still a headache.
* Liability is the killer. Hallucinate a building code clause? We’re dead. Insurance won’t touch us.
* We publish the audit logs to keep ourselves honest and make sure the system stays hardened.
Audit: https://logs.axoworks.com/audit-2026-02-19-v148.html
The hardest part was getting the intent right: making one LLM pivot seamlessly from a warm principal’s tone with a homeowner, to a defensive bulldog when attacked by a peer. That took 2.5 months of tuning.
We burn through tokens with an 'Eager RAG' hack (pre-fetching guesses) just to improve responsiveness. I also ripped out the “essential” persistent DBs—less than 5% of visitors ever return, so why bother? If a client drops mid-query, their session vanishes. No server-side queues.
The point: To let me operate with a network of seasoned pros, and trim the fat.
Try to break it. I’ll be in the comments. Kee
loading...