A client wanted their management panel's AI assistant to answer questions like "what did this contact write me" or "who replied about a certain topic", pulling from thousands of conversations held on an external CRM. Between the idea and the first correct answer there was a bundling error that came back three times, a cursor that never advanced, and a phone number that pointed to the wrong contact.
What already existed, and what was really missing
The client's management panel already had a solid integration with the external CRM used to handle WhatsApp, SMS, and email conversations with contacts: reading sales pipelines, opening chat with bubbles and attachments, sending replies. All reusable infrastructure, already in production for a while. One specific piece was missing: no function queried the CRM's full contact directory — only opportunities inside a specific pipeline — and, more importantly, there was no way at all for the panel's AI assistant to read past conversations.
First rule, before writing a single new line of code: reuse what already worked. The function that read multiple pipeline stages in parallel, the modal that opened chat with full history, the function that sent messages — all proven and already in use. The one genuinely missing piece was a function able to search the entire contact directory, with text search and pagination, which the existing functions (built for single pipelines) didn't do.
