Back in 2006 when Ade Olonoh launched Intellistack (fka Formstack ), a whole new toolset was born for the non-developer like me. While I could conceptualize a product or idea and how it should work, I never took the time to learn to code beyond HTML.
Fast forward to today, vibecoding tools have given us a set of power engines that allow the conceptual designer to create full stack applications that can be used in the real world. Well I guess that’s where it’s not exactly clear. Would you rely solely on ChatGPT for critical health advice? Would you use a life plan from Claude verbatim with no effort of your own? And then of course the question in line with this conversation…would you trust AI wholly with housing your sensitive data online (or your customers) without any idea what’s happening behind the scenes?
Real engineers can use Cursor or Claude code to accelerate their work but can keep an eye on the results to check quality and interoperability. For me…that’s a no-go with my own technical skillset. While I can QA the end product, I can’t know where the security holes exist or how well it will scale. So I started an experiment.
The Project
Outcome: Build a chatbot for my website (think Drift or Intercom)
Required Features:
- Basic Lead Collection + two-way communication with customers
- API Integration to Intellistack Streamline to kick off workflows
- Easy to use knowledgebase to power an AI agent to answer questions for customers
- Multi-tenant platform with js embed chatbot for each customer
- Stripe payments for customers to signup and pay for the product
There are some tremendous tools out there to get started. I used Replit for my project and have had some great success so far.
I’ll share more of that next time.
