I built a Discord bot that gives my thirteen-year-old and a few of her friends an AI assistant they can talk to. The model call is the least interesting line in the whole project. Everything worth writing about is the code wrapped around it: where the AI is allowed to run, what runs before it, and the handful of things that broke along the way.
This is the practitioner cut. If you're building a bot for a small private server, especially one with minors in it, here's the architecture and the specific failures, with the values scrubbed.
Containment first: one channel, one command
The instinct is to let the bot respond to everything. Don't. A bot that reads every message is noisy, ships a constant stream of user text off to the model, and is nearly impossible to audit. I made the AI opt-in: one channel, one slash command, public replies.
# AI is opt-in: one channel, one command, public replies
