Lightweight OpenTelemetry for Chatbots
How to add distributed tracing, custom metrics, and cost tracking to three different chatbot architectures with only 25MB of overhead. Cloud-native observability without Prometheus or Grafana.
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Insights and learnings from building real-world software.
April 7, 2026
April 6, 2026
Best Practices for Persisting Chatbot Conversations
When building chatbots, one critical decision is whether and how to persist conversation history. Lessons learned from deploying three different implementations with different persistence strategies.
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April 6, 2026
Deterministic vs Black-Box Chatbots: Why Showing the Work Matters
Most chatbots are black boxes. I built a step-by-step agent that shows every query and result — and the difference in trust, debugging, and usefulness was dramatic.
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April 5, 2026
Comparing Chatbots: Three Different Architectures
Three chatbot implementations: Kafka + HTTP polling, WebSocket streaming, and WebSocket + SQL. Same Django backend, completely different flows and PostgreSQL usage patterns.
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April 5, 2026
Learnings from Claude Code That Apply to Any Chatbot
Design principles extracted from Claude Code's multi-step agent pattern: structured output, guardrails in code, error recovery, and more.
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