Front Desk
The bot that runs the Chill Gamers Discord: levels, roles, moderation, a Minecraft bridge, and a catch-up summary of what you missed, written by a local model. It replaced two hosted bots.
The constraint
A small community server ends up renting its personality from hosted bots: one for levels, one for moderation, each with a paywall on the feature you actually want and no way to make them talk to each other.
The approach
Write the server's one bot. Front Desk replaces Lurkr and MEE6 with cogs it owns, bridges chat to the Minecraft server, and summarises a channel you missed with a model running locally, so a conversation never leaves the machine to be summarised.
- 1Replace, then extend
Rebuilt what the hosted bots did as cogs the server owns, then added what they could not do: the Minecraft bridge and local summaries.
- 2Keep logic out of cogs
Discord handlers are thin; the rules live in plain modules that the test suite exercises without a gateway connection.
- 3Audit the economy
Ran a security pass over the rewards system before the server relied on it.
- 4Fail loudly about permissions
A self-check names the permissions the bot is missing, instead of a command failing silently later.
Outcomes
- Replaced Lurkr and MEE6 with one bot the server owns
- A Minecraft bridge, and a ping when three or more players are online, read from the public status protocol only
- /catchup summaries from a local Ollama model
- A security pass on the rewards system, and a self-check that reports missing permissions before a command fails
- A landing page and ban-appeal form at discord.lscaturchio.xyz
Built the single bot that runs a community Discord, replacing two hosted bots with owned cogs, a Minecraft bridge and local-model catch-up summaries.
Covered it with a CI-run test suite of over four thousand tests and a startup permission self-check.
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