Building an AI agent into my portfolio site

Most portfolio sites bury the interesting parts under a wall of text. I wanted mine to answer the question a visitor actually has — "can this person build the thing I need?" — so I put a small AI agent on the homepage and let people ask.

The shape of it

The agent is a streaming chat endpoint built on the Vercel AI SDK. It runs streamText with a handful of tools and streams text deltas, tool calls, and token usage back to the browser over server-sent events. The whole thing is grounded in a tiny content corpus — markdown files for each job, a typed list of projects, and a resume — so the model answers from facts instead of hallucinating a career.

Grounding beats prompting

The single most important decision was tools over a giant system prompt. Rather than stuffing my entire history into the context window, the agent calls small functions:

• list_projects / read_project — the portfolio, by slug
• list_jobs / read_job — employment history from markdown
• read_resume — the top-level CV
• search — full-text ranking across all of the above

The model decides what it needs, fetches it, and answers. That keeps responses accurate, keeps the prompt small, and means I update content by editing a markdown file — not by re-engineering a prompt.

Guardrails

A public, model-backed endpoint is a small attack surface, so it has limits: per-IP rate limiting, a cap on conversation turns and tool steps, and a hard input length. The system prompt keeps the agent on-topic — career, projects, skills, contact — and tells it to refer to me in the third person so it reads like a knowledgeable assistant rather than me pretending to be a chatbot.

What I'd tell you if you asked the agent

I'm a staff/principal engineer with 25+ years of full-stack experience — TypeScript, Next.js, React, GraphQL, and infrastructure on AWS and Vercel — and I've spent the last few years on AI-augmented product surfaces like this one. If that's useful to you, the agent on the [homepage](/) knows the details, or you can just email me.