An embeddable AI chat widget for WordPress

The brief was deceptively small: drop a chat box onto any WordPress site with a single <script> tag. The hard part was everything the tag couldn't be allowed to break.

What I learned shipping it

1. One tag, zero blocking. The embed loads async and renders into a Shadow DOM, so the host theme's CSS can't bleed in and my styles can't bleed out. The host page paints first; the widget arrives whenever it's ready.
2. Keep keys off the browser. The widget never holds a model key — it talks to my own endpoint, which proxies the provider. The client only ever sees my origin.
3. Stream for perceived speed. Tokens arrive incrementally over the stream, so the answer feels alive long before it's complete. Latency you can watch is latency people forgive.
4. Ground it, then fence it. Answers are retrieved from the site's own content, and guardrails keep the bot on-topic instead of free-associating.

Front end to infra: a button anyone can paste is really a small distributed system in disguise.