Growbot changelog

The site has a proper contact form now, at /contact/, and the email address has gone from every page. Growbot moved over with it.

• When Growbot sends you to William, it sends you to the contact form, never an email address. Ask it for one and it'll explain why there isn't one.
• Links to this site in Growbot's replies are clickable now. Links anywhere else stay as plain text, so a reply can't turn into a link off the site.
• The messages you get when you hit a limit point to the form too.

What we learned

An email address on a web page gets found by spam robots within days, however it's disguised. A form with a few quiet checks behind it does a better job, and every message still lands with William. Growbot needed telling twice: once where the contact details live in its notes, and once as a plain rule not to hand out an address, because a robot that has seen an address in its notes will happily repeat it if asked nicely.

Growbot has always bobbed up and down. It turned out the whole page was bobbing with him, a couple of pixels at a time, which made reading the chat faintly seasick. That's fixed, and he's got a few more moves to make up for it.

• The page stays still now. Only Growbot moves.
• A proper hop: he stretches on the way up and squashes when he lands.
• He glances left and right every few seconds, blinks twice now and then, and every so often tilts his head as if he's thinking about something.
• Point at him and he jumps.
• While he's writing a reply he bobs faster and his eyes scan back and forth, so you can tell he's busy.
• If your device asks for less motion, he keeps still.

What we learned

Growbot is drawn as a small picture with its own instructions for how to move. One of those instructions said "make the body bob", meaning his body. But the picture sits inside the web page, and the page has a body too, so the browser bobbed both. The fix was to give every part of Growbot a name nobody else on the page uses. Small pictures dropped into a page share everything with it, names included.

Growbot can now talk to people who aren't logged in. Same yellow square, different brief. It goes live on the site as soon as its page is switched on.

• Visitors get a Growbot that knows the studio, the services and the prices, and points to the real pages rather than reciting them from memory. Clients who log in still get their own version, with the "Send this to William" button.
• The public one is chattier. A tin robot who's pleased to be switched on, rather than a helpdesk.
• There are limits, because the running costs are shared with paying clients: a dozen messages per chat, a short pause between messages, a daily allowance per visitor, and a ceiling on the public bot as a whole each day. When a limit's reached, Growbot says so and gives you William's email.
• A quiet check that you're a person before a chat starts. No puzzles, no clicking on traffic lights.
• Growbot now quotes how many hosting places are left from the same number the site uses, so it can't go stale.

What we learned

Keeping a robot honest about prices is mostly about telling it what it doesn't know. Every price the public Growbot may quote sits in one short file, checked against the service pages. Anything else, it sends you to William.

Asked how many hosting places were left, the client Growbot said it didn't know, even though the number was right there in its notes. It was buried in a few thousand words of background. Moving it into the short note that goes with every message fixed it straight away. Where you put something matters as much as whether it's there.

Counting messages without keeping anything personal took a bit of thought. Growbot counts by a scrambled code that changes every day, plus a small cookie that holds a random number. No IP addresses are stored, and nothing links today's visitor to tomorrow's.

Same day, second go.

• Growbot and the bit about what it is now sit on the left, with the chat on the right. You can see who you're talking to while you talk to it. On a phone it's still one column.
• The note above the chat saying Growbot is an AI was pale green on grey and almost impossible to read. Which rather undermines the point of having it. It's black on grey now.
• Chat replies were being stretched to fill each line, like a newspaper column, with odd gaps between words. They're ordinary left-aligned text now.
• This changelog. Growbot reads it too, so you can ask it what's new.

What we learned

The unreadable note was a clash between two sets of styling. A rule somewhere else on the site was more specific than ours, so it won, quietly. If you've ever changed a colour in WordPress and watched nothing happen, that's usually why.

The first working Growbot. A yellow square that blinks, on a private page our hosting clients log in to.

William wrote a brief: what it should do, what it must never do, and how to keep the running costs sane. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, built it from that brief in a day, on a copy of this site running on William's Mac. We tested it there before anything went near the live site.

What it does:

• Answers questions about your WordPress site, our hosting, and using AI tools like Claude to look after a website.
• Remembers the conversation while your browser tab is open, and forgets it when you close the tab.
• Has a "Send this to William" button, which emails him the whole conversation so he can pick it up.

The rules it started with:

• It says plainly that it's an AI, and never pretends to be William.
• It can't see, log in to, or change your website. It can only talk.
• It never asks for passwords, and tells you to change one if you paste it in.
• 30 messages a day per person, so the bill stays sensible.

What we learned

Growbot runs on Claude Haiku, the smallest and quickest of Anthropic's models. For answering questions, that's plenty.

Everything Growbot knows comes from a handful of plain text files: who it is, how it talks, and the facts about our hosting. When something's wrong, we change a file and it's fixed for everyone.

Where a fact wasn't confirmed yet, like the hourly rate, we left Growbot not knowing it rather than guessing. An assistant that says "I don't know, ask William" is more use than one that's confidently wrong.

Grow Creative's Christmas card one year was a photo comic: William building a robot out of cardboard boxes painted yellow, in the style of a 1950s Japanese wind-up tin toy. It was called Growbot.

It never existed. Now it does, more or less.

The original artwork will turn up at some point, and the character gets redrawn then. Until that happens, Growbot is a yellow square with two eyes.