Blog

Notes from the side projects: charts, chat assistants, and the lessons in between.

2026

  1. Sep 063 min read

    One cobalt line on the roof

    A design brief in one photograph, applied to an admin as a system: the roofline, one black primary per view, and screenshots as the only verification that counts.

  2. Sep 064 min read

    Three small things that make a cafe bot feel finished

    Tappable contact details, a glossary under the analytics bars, and staff logins that see only their own tenant.

  3. Sep 063 min read

    Ten minutes a week

    The owner's loop: the Unanswered report, the answer-cache inspector, Slack pings and retention, as a habit rather than a feature list.

  4. Sep 063 min read

    A second kind of tenant

    Why a chess coach could not run on a platform that refuses everything but the business, and the one-column change that was the right size.

  5. Sep 064 min read

    The baiting weekend

    What strangers tried on a cafe bot, the two places it bent, and why the real fix was making refusals visible.

  6. Sep 022 min read

    Teach the bot from a PDF, without burning tokens

    michi-chat can now turn a PDF into knowledge-base facts. The analysis is free, the mechanical junk is stripped deterministically, and you see what the AI clean-up would cost before a single token is spent.

  7. Aug 315 min read

    How michi-chat works

    The journey of one question through michi-chat: guardrails, the semantic cache, the tool loop, and why a LiteLLM proxy makes the AI model a config edit instead of a rewrite.

  8. Aug 304 min read

    Introducing michi-chat

    A small self-hostable chat assistant platform for small businesses: multi-tenant, grounded in tools and RAG, and built to never invent a fact. The first tenant is Mugshot Artisan Cafe of mugshotmnl.com.