Skillforge

Overview

Skillforge is an AI communication coach built into Signed Docs Republic. You pick a scenario — asking for a raise, giving hard feedback, pushing back on your boss, saying no — learn the technique in a short lesson, then role-play the conversation against an AI that convincingly plays the other person. When you're done, it returns a structured debrief on what landed and what to try next. It runs entirely in the browser, with no account and no cost to the user, across a catalogue of 24 lessons organised into skill tracks from Foundations to advocating for yourself.

The Challenge

A good conversation-practice tool is easy to imagine and hard to ship responsibly. The AI has to stay in character as a realistic, slightly resistant counterpart rather than collapsing into a helpful assistant that agrees with everything. Replies need to stream so a live conversation feels natural, not like waiting on a page load. And because it's open to the public with no login gate, it had to be safe to run at scale from day one: resistant to abuse, bounded in cost, and impossible to turn into someone else's free LLM proxy.

The Solution

I built the coach as a self-contained front-end widget backed by a Laravel service that brokers every model call. The engineering that matters lives on the server side:

• Token-by-token response streaming over Server-Sent Events, so the AI counterpart replies live in the chat
• Prompt design that holds the model in role as the other person, then switches to an evaluator to produce the structured debrief
• A scenario system of 24 lessons across skill tracks, each with its own briefing, coaching notes, and role-play setup
• Layered abuse and cost controls: per-user and global daily spend caps, per-IP request rate limits, per-session limits, and input-length ceilings on every call
• A no-login guest flow — instant access with server-side session tracking instead of accounts
• A provider-agnostic model layer, so the underlying LLM can be swapped without touching the coaching logic

The Result

Skillforge turns a document-signing site into something people have a reason to return to: a private, judgement-free place to rehearse the conversations they'd rather avoid. It's live and free to try — the guardrails mean it can stay open to the public without becoming a liability, and the provider-agnostic design means it can follow whichever model offers the best price and quality over time.