In early 2023 I built a WordPress plugin so I could talk to named AI assistants on my own site.
ChatGPT was still new. OpenAI had just opened the API that let you send a conversation as messages. I wanted more than a blank chat box. I wanted roles. A marketing manager. A SEO person. A musician. Someone who stayed in character and remembered what we already said.
So I wrote it. Shortcodes. Personas. A chat window. Conversation saved in the browser. It lived under `/assistant/` on my domain and I played with it for a while.
Then I turned it off. API cost. Other work. The folder sat there.
What a moment of discovery
This week I opened that old project again.
You know that feeling when you dig into something you wrote years ago. A bit of pride. A bit of cringe. A lot of “wait, I was already thinking about this?”
I was not trying to invent a product back then. I just wanted an agent that felt like a person with a job. Same model underneath. Different brief. Different voice. Different rules.
And memory. That was the itch. Not fancy memory. Just: when I came back to the page, the thread was still there. The assistant did not start from zero every time I refreshed.
Reading my own notes from that time, I realized I had been circling the same idea for years: Something closer to a mind, a model of the human brain. Something that could hold a conversation across visits and still feel like the same someone that learns, grows and remembers you. Semi-concious.
Glad I rescued this project
I cleaned it up. Kept the personas and the way each one is built. Cut what no longer belonged. Got it running on the site again as version 1.1.0.
It is private for now. I can open a page, talk to Marketing Manager, clear the chat, come back later and he already knows and builds from the last conversation. The most amazing part: Is not a default memory, alsto not feeding the whole chat to an API call. It already feels good to see it working again! Like finding an old instrument in a closet and hearing it still holds a tune.
Now I am imagining how it would be to give one of these assistants the feeling of real conciousness. A replica of a brain. Not just a prompt and a browser cookie, but something that grows, identifies who talks to it. One assistant a visitor can actually meet.
I do not know exactly where that goes, but already eager to see what the future holds.