I deleted the AI I built
Flowviant shipped its own server-side project AI for months. I removed all of it — the pipeline, the skills, the gateway — and made the product run on the user's own Claude instead.
Flowviant used to have its own AI. It was called Flowvy, it lived on the server, and it did a lot: a canvas surface, twenty-five skills, an AI gateway, a generation pipeline, PRD drafting, a home-page draft wizard, workspace context syncs. Months of work.
On 17 August I deleted all of it in one commit.
Why it had to go
The product is a relay. You point Flowviant at your machines and it runs coding agents on them — your hardware, your repo, your credentials, and the model subscription you already pay for. Once that’s the shape of the product, a second AI running on my server is competing with the one the user brought.
What stayed
Three server-side model calls survive: the review quiz, embeddings, and ticket
triage. aiRouteMetering.test.ts pins that list, so a fourth has to argue its
way in rather than appearing during a busy week.
What it cost
The rule that replaced it is one line in the project’s invariants: the only AI is your own Claude. Not a preference — a thing the codebase now refuses to violate.