We Built an AI Chat Widget With a Rust Gateway Sidecar

#rust #chatbot #ai #webdev

The Node.js Bottleneck

Our chat platform routes thousands of concurrent WebSocket connections. Node.js handles this fine — until you need sub-millisecond routing decisions for which messages go to AI vs. human agents.

The Rust Sidecar Pattern

Instead of rewriting the entire backend in Rust, we added a Rust gateway sidecar: message routing in <1ms, per-tenant rate limiting (no Redis RTT), WebSocket multiplexing, circuit breaker health checks.

Chat101 lets you upload docs, FAQs, or paste URLs. The AI trains on your content and answers tier-1 questions automatically. When it cannot answer, it routes to a human agent.

Do not rewrite everything. Sidecar the bottleneck.

Chat101 — AI live chat for SaaS. 2-minute setup.

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