Phase 1: Building the foundation before the agent - what a chatbot looks like when you treat it like a real system

The architectural decisions that came before the agent — and an honest look at what a basic LLM chatbot can and cannot do.

Building a production-grade AI agent in public, one phase at a time.

← Series introduction: I'm building a production-grade AI airline assistant in public. Here's the plan.

Part 2 — Phase 2: Tool calling is coming next.

In the series introduction, I made a specific promise: this would be a real journey, not a polished tutorial. The decisions, the alternatives, the mistakes, and the reasoning behind each. So let me start at the beginning — before there was any code, before there was even a project name.