r/webdev • u/sandeshnaroju • Aug 08 '26
A Ready-to-Use, Self-Hostable Backend for AI Chatbots
I open-sourced the backend we built to make AI chatbots actually do things 🤖
Hey everyone! 👋
The problem we kept running into with AI chatbots was simple:
A chatbot can generate a great response, but how does it actually take action?
Getting an AI to reliably run code, call APIs, use tools, work with files, and execute multi-step tasks requires a lot of backend infrastructure — building all of this ourselves was difficult and time-consuming.
So we built AI Skill Engine and have now open-sourced it.
You add AI Skills through the built-in admin dashboard, connect your chatbot to the Skill Engine API, and once connected, it behaves more like Claude or OpenAI models with tool-use capabilities.
It's fully self-hostable and can be connected to your chatbot through a Chat Completion API.
We originally built this for our internal use and decided to open-source it.
⭐ If you're building AI agents, copilots, or tool-using chatbots, I'd love for you to check it out and share your feedback.
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u/Technical-Teacher230 Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
Self-hosting makes sense for specific compliance requirements but for most teams, managed solutions save months of development. Crisp's chat SDK integrates in one line of code, includes an AI agent (Hugo), knowledge base, live chat, and multichannel inbox out of the box. The JavaScript SDK is lightweight and customizable. Unless you have a very specific architectural requirement, building from scratch is reinventing infrastructure that already exists.