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Great ! The strategy to make your complementary product easy to create

    All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

 by JOEL SPOLSKY, Strategy Letter V

> framework-agnostic, drop-in chat solution

Maybe I'm being dumb but is this a generic chat UI for openai models only? Pretty bearish on adoption of this if so. As a pragmatic dev I'd definitely not be keen to bake model lock-in into my UI for functionality as generic as chat.

The openai library works with most other providers by just changing the endpoint url, and this is Apache licensed, so I feel good about using it.

Did they still not release "Bring your own subscription" "login with ChatGPT" and letting people apply their subscription/quota to other apps/services? There are so many use-cases where someone builds a usefull scaffold (e.g. even static website) that could benefit from integration with LLMs but rolling the authentication, having API-keys, free budgets etc. is scary. It would be much better if that could be outsourced to the LLM provider of the user.

It would bear a good lock-in effect for OAI as well

Would be great if they provided at least some guidance how to keep this thing on topic. Even the official demo https://chatkit.world/ is not restricted, it happily chats about whatever.

Oh man this thing tells me my iPhone 13 mini isn’t wide enough to use it, that’s rough.

It doesn’t work on my iPhone 17 Pro Max either and when I turn it to landscape it’s buggy and doesn’t work. Great demo…

Thats like the opposite of what Open AI would really want though.

They want people walking up saying "we commit to spending $100k monthly for the next year let's discuss bulk discounts."

> framework-agnostic

Later,

> 2. Install the React bindings

So not so framework-agnostic, or am I missing something ?

They have web components if you want

[dead]

There are so many libraries called chatkit or some variation of that including the one I am working on - chatbotkit (I guess some SEO will rub off).

Apart from that, it looks like an interesting initiative, but I fail to see what this is supposed to replace. Widgets? Customer support? I mean, sure, you can create some kind of question-answer bot, but for something more substantial, you'll need a completely different dashboard and backend. I can't see how OpenAI will accomplish this without butchering their existing UI.

This looks very similar to CopilotKit and AG-UI. With CopilotKit you can have some tools implemented client-side and others server-side using AG-UI.

https://www.copilotkit.ai/

With ChatKit you can proxy everything through your ChatKit API "proxy" and implement the "agentic" stuff in the proxy.

Even the React APIs look very similar.

Looks like a vendor lock-in and a way to stop the AG-UI ecosystem

But even with AG-UI,CopilotKit is a paid service. Everyone's trying to do vendor lock in, it's really annoying. They make the dev experience worse and you have to pay for it? It's like every langcrap service out there

And CopilotKit needs a JS backend for a proxy that holds the state for the chat which is quite a pain if you want to scalably self-host. Maybe ChatKit will be less lock-in than CopilotKit.

no demo link or screenshots in the Github readme? OpenAI surely could have had their marketing department create something quick?

Demos are at https://chatkit.studio/

What are the benefits of this framework compared with alternatives, and will it work with frameworks other than React?

I wonder how it compares to https://ai-sdk.dev

Looks a little nicer than the vercel equivalent.

> Your screen is too small for chatkit.world

> Make your window wider or open on desktop to continue

For a chat app UI?

(BTW, I had to take a screenshot then use image to text inference in order to copy that message)