A log of progress for the week of October 6, 2025.
Last week, we transitioned from our AI breakthrough to building the solid application core. We ended with a crucial question: how do we empower tenants to understand the complex legal language of their contracts? This week, we answered that question. After days of focused, behind-the-scenes work, we built and committed the first version of a feature that brings our application’s data to life: the AI Chat Assistant.
The Quiet Before the Commit: Security, Tooling, and Embeddings
The first half of the week might have seemed quiet on the surface, but it was a period of intense and essential preparation. Before integrating a major new feature, we had to ensure our foundations were rock-solid.
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Security First: Our first action was to integrate data-secrets into the repository. As we are designing the system to handle sensitive documents, building a secure and trusted platform is non-negotiable. This step hardens our codebase against accidental secret exposure from the very beginning.
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The Brains of the Operation: The most critical preparatory work was on a new script: build-embeddings.js. For the chat assistant to be truly intelligent, it can’t just “read” the text; it needs to understand the semantic meaning of the contract clauses. This script creates vector embeddings—turning the legal text into a rich mathematical representation. This is the magic that will allow the AI to grasp the context behind a tenant’s question and provide a genuinely relevant answer.
Throughout the week, we methodically staged the necessary components—new UI elements, backend scripts, and API routes—all leading up to the main development push.
The Sunday Milestone: Committing the AI Chat Assistant
On Sunday, October 12th, it all came together. We pushed a major new feature commit to our development branch: feat(chat): Chat assistant UI + heuristics.
This commit marks a huge milestone. The first functional version of our AI Chat Assistant is now in the codebase. Within our development environment, a user can now interact with their tenancy contracts in a simple, conversational way. The goal is for them to ask plain-English questions like:
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“What are the rules for keeping pets?”
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“What is the penalty for late rent payment?”
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“When does my notice period start?”
The assistant, powered by the embeddings we created, is designed to provide immediate, context-aware answers sourced directly from their legal document. This is a monumental step forward in our mission to empower users and bring transparency to the rental process.
The new feature was bundled in a large, consolidated commit that also included updated documentation, deployment notes, and various operational scripts, ensuring a clean and comprehensive development milestone.
This week, we delivered on the vision we set out in Week 6. We’ve successfully evolved the application from a system that merely stores data into a platform that creates a dialogue. The AI is no longer just an ingestion tool; it’s becoming a core part of the user experience, poised to provide tangible value and clarity to tenants.