Articles
Longer reads about michi-chat from the maker's blog - the story and the reasoning behind the features, written for curious readers rather than as reference.
Introducing michi-chat
2026-08-30. What the assistant does and why it exists: one instance serving many small businesses, each with its own persona, knowledge and tools - and why the whole platform stayed small enough to read in an afternoon.
How michi-chat works
2026-08-31. The journey of one question through the system: guardrails, the semantic cache, the tool loop, and why the model layer is a LiteLLM proxy - so swapping the AI model is a config edit, not a rewrite. No AI background needed.
Teach the bot from a PDF, without burning tokens
2026-09-02. The design story behind the PDF import: the free work happens first, the paid work shows its price before it runs, and why a dirty PDF's real cost was never the tokens. The hands-on version is the Turn a PDF into knowledge tutorial here in the docs.
The baiting weekend
2026-09-06. What strangers tried on a cafe bot, the two places it bent, and why the real fix was observability: store the refusals, flag the conversation, label every turn with how it was produced. Also why visitor IPs are still not stored.
Ten minutes a week
2026-09-06. The owner's loop: the Unanswered report, the answer-cache inspector, Slack pings, and the retention setting, as a habit rather than a feature list.
A second kind of tenant
2026-09-06. Why a chess coach could not run on a platform that refuses everything but the business, why a plugin and a fork were both wrong, and the one-column change that was the right size.
One cobalt line on the roof
2026-09-06. A design brief in one photograph, applied as a system: the roofline, the two-pixel radius, one black primary per view, and screenshots as the only verification that counts.
Three small things that make a cafe bot feel finished
2026-09-06. Tappable contact details, a glossary under the analytics bars, and staff logins that see only their own tenant. Why the finished feeling of a product lives in the seams, and the guards that mattered: digit counting so prices never become phone links, a returns sentence no tool pack can skip, and a scope enforced in the queries rather than the menu.
New posts land on the blog first and get linked here when they're about michi-chat.