# Mindster Chat

**Live URL:** https://chat.mindster.space

## Writeup

Mindster Chat is a live, deployed web chatbot with a real LLM backend, built and shipped end-to-end on Vercel. The frontend is a single-page dark/glass UI — gradient-accented bubbles, an animated typing indicator, auto-resizing textarea, and mobile-friendly responsive layout — written in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with zero frontend dependencies for minimal latency and maximum reliability.

The backend is a Vercel serverless function (`/api/chat`) that proxies chat completions to the DeepSeek API, keeping the API key server-side only (read from environment variables, never exposed to the client or committed to source). It maintains full conversation history client-side and forwards it on each turn for coherent multi-turn dialogue. Errors (network failures, upstream API errors) are caught and surfaced gracefully in the UI rather than failing silently.

**Tech stack:** Vercel serverless functions (Node.js), DeepSeek LLM API, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend, zero build step — deployed directly via Vercel CLI for near-instant iteration and deploy speed.

The result: a fast, polished, production-deployed chatbot demonstrating a complete real-world LLM integration pattern — secure key handling, clean API proxying, and a genuinely pleasant chat UX — built under tight time constraints.