What I have been building lately
A short note on Koh Pich Bot, a small side project built for my own circle.
Lately I have been spending time on Koh Pich Bot, a Telegram bot built less like a generic assistant and more like a small personality living inside a group chat.
It is a side project, but not a random one. The point is to make something useful and funny for my own circle: a bot that understands the local rhythm of the chat, remembers enough context to follow what people are talking about, and responds in a way that feels closer to the group than to a polished SaaS demo.
That makes the work weird in a good way. The technical problem is not just “call an LLM and reply.” It is conversation context, Telegram topic behavior, reply chains, image generation, vision follow-ups, romanized Khmer, group tone, and all the tiny edge cases that only show up when real friends use the thing casually.
Why this is interesting
Most AI products try to be broadly useful to everyone. Koh Pich Bot is the opposite direction: small, local, and personalized.
That constraint makes it more alive. It can have inside jokes. It can understand recurring people. It can react to the mood of a thread. It can be helpful sometimes, chaotic sometimes, and still be doing its job because the goal is not corporate correctness. The goal is to fit the room.
A bot for strangers has to be safe and general. A bot for your own circle can be more specific. That is where the fun is.
What I have been working on
The recent work has mostly been about making the bot less dumb in real conversations.
That means better stored group context, cleaner handling of Telegram topics, stronger reply-chain awareness, and making sure the bot knows who is currently asking instead of accidentally answering the wrong person from an earlier thread. It also means image and vision behavior that can follow the conversation instead of treating every request like a fresh command from nowhere.
These are not glamorous features, but they matter. In a group chat, a bot that misses context immediately feels fake. A bot that follows the thread feels present.
The shape of the project
Koh Pich Bot is not trying to become a big platform. That would probably ruin it.
It is better as a personalized tool: built close to the people who use it, tuned through actual group behavior, and allowed to stay a little strange. The value is not scale. The value is fit.
That is what I have been doing lately: building a small AI thing for a real social space, then sanding down the rough parts as the room teaches me what the bot should become.