I Built ReplyBuddy Because My Friend Never Knows What to Reply

Udit Sharma — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:53:32 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built ReplyBuddy, a simple AI-powered tool that helps you write better replies to messages.

The idea came from a small but very common problem. Sometimes you know what you want to say, but you are not sure how to say it. You might want to sound friendly without being too casual, professional without sounding robotic, or simply want a short and natural reply.

I built ReplyBuddy for a friend who often spends a lot of time thinking about what to reply to different messages. Instead of opening a general-purpose AI chatbot every time and explaining the whole situation, the idea was to make something focused specifically on that one problem.

With ReplyBuddy, you paste the message you received, choose the kind of response you want, and the AI generates a suitable reply.

For example, if someone sends:

"Can you send me the project files by tonight?"

You can choose a friendly or casual tone and get a response such as:

"Yeah sure, I'll send them over tonight."

The goal is not to replace the way someone communicates. It is simply to help when you have a blank screen and don't know how to phrase something.

Demo

Live Demo: [Add your deployed link here]

The project is currently available on GitHub:

ReplyBuddy GitHub Repository

I will also include a short video demonstration showing the main workflow of the application.

Code

The complete source code is available here:

https://github.com/uditsharma45/replybuddy-ai

The project is open source, so anyone can look at the implementation, run it locally, modify it, or build on top of it.

How I Built It

I wanted to keep the project simple enough for me to understand and build, while still making AI an actual part of the application rather than just adding an AI feature on top of an otherwise unrelated project.

The basic flow is:

The user enters the message they received.
The user selects the tone they want for their reply.
The application sends the message and the selected context to the AI.
The AI generates a natural response.
The user can copy the generated reply and use it in their conversation.

The project is built around an open-source AI model, which is responsible for understanding the incoming message and generating the response.

I intentionally kept the first version focused. Instead of trying to build a huge communication platform, I wanted to solve one small problem properly.

The project also gave me a chance to learn more about connecting a frontend to an AI-powered backend, handling user input, structuring prompts, and thinking about how an AI feature should actually fit into a product.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a project like ReplyBuddy, open innovation is important because it gives developers the opportunity to experiment with AI without treating the model as a black box that they cannot understand or control.

Using open-source and open-weight AI gives me more freedom to understand how the AI fits into my application and how the project could evolve in the future.

It also makes the project easier for other developers to experiment with. Someone can take the project, change the model, improve the prompting, add new tones, or build completely different features on top of it.

For me, that is one of the most interesting parts of open source. A project does not have to remain exactly the way its original creator built it.

ReplyBuddy started as a small solution for one person's everyday problem, but because it is open source, someone else can take the same idea in a completely different direction.

My Agent Session

I used AI-assisted development while building the project and experimented with different approaches to the application and its AI functionality.

[Add your DevRelay agent session here if you decide to include it.]

Prize Categories

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Final Thoughts

ReplyBuddy is a relatively small project, but that was intentional.

When I first started thinking about the challenge, I felt like I needed to build something complicated to make it worth submitting. Eventually, I realized that the point of "Build for a Friend" is not necessarily to build the biggest project.

It is about noticing a problem that someone close to you actually has and building something that can make that problem a little easier.

That is what I tried to do with ReplyBuddy.

There are still many things I want to improve, including better context handling, more personalized writing styles, and eventually allowing users to teach the application how they normally communicate.

For now, this is my first version of ReplyBuddy, and I am looking forward to seeing what I can improve next.

DEV Community: Udit Sharma