Golem
A full-stack developer support chatbot, built as a learning project.
After two years away from full-time engineering work, I needed a project that would force me back into the rhythm of shipping — and force me to learn the modern infrastructure I hadn't touched yet. Golem is the result.
It's a developer support chatbot that answers technical questions in a structured format: summary, root cause, debug steps, and relevant docs. Users sign in, ask questions, and get streaming responses. History is saved per-user. Under the hood, it pulls relevant documentation chunks from a vector store before generating each response.
The tech: Python/Flask backend, React/TypeScript frontend, Clerk for auth, Convex for the database, Qdrant for vector search, Voyage AI for embeddings, Redis for rate limiting, Railway for the API, Vercel for the frontend, GitHub Actions for CI, and Playwright for end-to-end tests.
I built this with a lot of help from Claude Code. Most of the production-grade pieces — vector search, RAG pipeline, rate limiting infrastructure — were tools I'd never used before. I shipped first to validate that the whole system works end-to-end, and I'm now going back through each layer to actually understand the why behind every choice. The point of the project wasn't to ship a product; it was to get my hands back on modern tooling and prove to myself I could still navigate complex integrations after time away.