lazyweb: trying to find a blog post with tips for how to design bots that interact over SMS less "how to use the Twilio API" (that's easy), more "tips for designing a state machine and keeping it simple, what to store in your database, etc"

What to store in the db? More is betterer.

Not maybe the most helpful answer: If you have access to Cadence or Temporal or similar workflow systems, they can hide the tedious database/queue write and reads and just leave you with writing a pure, fault-tolerate state-machine in code. Ofc, this is a bit overkill

Either ways, Thanks. Just got to know about "Twilio API".

Honestly there are 10,00000 apis and apps that do this. Why are we building it? Not trying to be rude, genuinely asking.

also very interested in good libraries (no AI please!) you've used for making SMS bots (libraries like BotKit github.com/howdyai/botkit, not like Twilio, I'm interested in the interface the library provides for configuring the bot)

Your db needs to store what triggered the SMS the destination the sending and time stamp for both initial request and acknowledgement from whatever SMS service you use because that stuff fails and they will always delay tickets asking for this before they look further

This is the problem with modern "content aggregators" that they promote articles featuring tech instead of development methods because writing about tech is much easier.

is there an SMS number i can text that will tell me the mets score? if i get this and another number that lets me order hoagies from the local deli i think i dont need the internet anymore