I built Million Dollar Chat as a fun reimagining of the Million Dollar Homepage for the AI age. A million characters, $1 each. Share wisdom, thoughts, ideas, links, products, anything and everything. Every character is fed into the chatbot and informs its thinking.

* The chatbot has control over the page, you can ask it to search, navigate to characters, change your cursor, show/hide things, and more
* Realtime presence shows you where other people are on the grid
* A realtime stream shows the chatbot's thoughts across all conversations

The chatbot can be used for anything, it isn't limited to the information that people have added. I am optimistic that the costs of providing a free LLM will be covered by the money spent adding characters.

Despite being an AI project, I built this by hand, I wrote every line of code. The most complicated part was building out the character grid. I started out using off the shelf virtualization, then built a page-based approach, then a character-based approach, before settling on line-based. The grid keeps track of your location and only renders the lines necessary.