We’re building a SaaS AI assistant in ~90 lines of TypeScript (Live)

Most AI assistant demos look impressive until you try to actually ship them inside a product. That’s where things usually break. Not because of the model, but because of the infrastructure around it: managing state across steps, handling tool calls, and dealing with retries. The "Demo-to-Production" Gap After experimenting with different approaches, we kept running into the same problem: systems were either too abstract and hard to control, or too manual and impossible to scale. We decided to try something different - keeping everything in code. No visual builders, no hidden layers. Just a TypeScript-based workflow that defines how the assistant behaves. Why Code-First over No-Code? Surprisingly, this made things much simpler. Instead of "prompt engineering," it started to feel more like actual software engineering: Explicit state: No more guessing what the agent remembers. Predictable execution: You control the flow, not a black-box framework. Easier debugging: Standard logs and trace