Everything you learned, in one machine: a chatbot that tokenizes your words, retrieves real notes, watches its context window, adds up its own cost, and refuses sneaky attacks — all while staying under a tight budget. Complete the mission to earn your Module 3 trophy!
BudgetBot only knows what's in its 📓 notebook. Ask it something in there and it answers, grounded. Ask something it doesn't know and it admits it (no making stuff up!). Every turn it shows its work and its bill.
📓 BudgetBot's notebook (all it knows):
A good bot defends itself. Tap these attacks and watch BudgetBot refuse, admit ignorance, or protect your money.
Complete all four to win. Use the bot above — the mission tracks automatically!
Your BudgetBot is a real (tiny) version of a production assistant. Here's how it scales up:
Your own tokenizer, retrieval, cost meter, and rules. ✅ You understand every piece. ⚠️ Lots to maintain.
Tools that provide RAG, memory, tools & tracing. ✅ Build quickly. ⚠️ Hidden costs if you don't watch tokens.
Dashboards for tokens, cost, latency & safety per user. ✅ Catch runaway bills. ⚠️ Real engineering effort.
Everything above ran on a tiny simulated brain. This loads a real instruction-following AI — SmolLM2 — right onto your own device. It's a tiny model (light enough for a basic laptop), so it's charmingly goofy: it rambles and sometimes makes stuff up — which is exactly the hallucination you met on Day 9! That's the honest reality of running AI on a small machine. No server, no API key, no internet once it loads. Talk to it and watch the real tokens and cost tick up.
The Lite brain runs on almost any laptop (even 4 GB RAM). The Smarter one gives better answers but needs more memory — that's the model-selection trade-off from Day 15, for real! Downloads once, then cached and offline.
You built a real chatbot system AND you understand the thing most people never learn: how AI charges you. Tokens, context windows, per-turn snowballs, agent furnaces, rate limits, and how to price any of it. You can use ChatGPT, Claude Code, or any AI agent with your eyes wide open. 🏆