ChaiBuilder ships with built-in AI: a chat panel inside the visual builder that lets you change the page you're working on by describing what you want, plus AI helpers attached to specific parts of the interface - SEO fields, the theme editor, and the media manager. Its main job is to remove the need to know styling or CSS: instead of editing by hand, you ask.

The assistant is bring-your-own AI: it runs against a provider you configure with your key, consistent with the rest of ChaiBuilder's data and infrastructure ownership model. ChaiBuilder does not sit between you and the model.

What it can do

In the chat panel

Capability	What it covers
Edit a page	Reads and rewrites blocks, adds and removes them, inserts custom blocks, and binds block props to data. Tool-driven and streamed, so you watch it work.
Edit a block	The same conversation scoped to a single selected block.
Generate images	Produces an image from a description, inside the chat flow.
Translate content	Translates page content into a target language, and updates previously translated content when the source changes.
Page context	Saves and recalls a per-page context note the assistant carries into later requests.

Attached to the interface

Capability	What it covers
SEO fields	Generates title, description, ogTitle, ogDescription, searchTitle, searchDescription, and JSON-LD - with length rules applied and optional target keywords.
Theme generation	Generates a CSS design-token theme for the site.
Enhance with AI	Cleans up a rough draft of your site context, page context, or a prompt into a structured, usable version.
Image alt text	Writes a description for an image in the media manager.

Under the hood each of these is a named action - AI_EDIT_PAGE, AI_GENERATE_SEO_FIELD, AI_GENERATE_THEME, and so on. The names matter if you plan to customize prompts, restrict models per action, or set permissions; see AI - Customization.

Scope: one page at a time

The assistant operates at the page level. The scope of any interaction is the page currently open in the builder - it reads that page's context and applies its changes there. It is not a site-wide agent, and it doesn't act across pages in a single request.

Permissions

AI capabilities are gated by role permissions, so you can grant the assistant to some editors and not others - or allow chat editing while withholding the more expensive operations:

Permission	Governs
ai:use	The chat panel, SEO fields, enhance-with-AI, alt text
ai:read	Reading AI context and credit/addon status
ai:generate_image	Image generation
ai:generate_theme	Theme generation

See Roles & Permissions.

Where it lives

The open-source core (chaicore) includes simple AI editing - you can add your own tools and change the prompts to build your own assistant. The full assistant is Pro: page and block editing, SEO, and AI theme generation come from the ai-pro plugin (with ai-credits for usage metering), registered in your chaibuilder.plugins.ts. The AI needs a server to hold your provider credentials and run requests.

The AI is built on the open-source Vercel AI SDK, which is why the assistant is both quick to turn on and deeply customizable.

Getting it running

Add credentials for one AI provider to your environment and the assistant is live. With just a gateway key and nothing else configured:

AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY=your_key_here

OpenRouter, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and Cloudflare Workers AI are also supported out of the box. Full steps in AI - Setup.

Making it yours

Defaults are a starting point. Because the core is the Vercel AI SDK, you can choose which models editors may pick, restrict models per action, transform the prompt behind any action, contribute your own tools to page editing, or route through any provider. These are code changes, not re-architecting. See AI - Customization.

Where to go next

• AI - Setup - providers, API keys, quickstart.
• AI - Customization - models, prompts, tools, custom providers.
• Page Editing - editing content and blocks with the assistant.
• SEO & Theme - the SEO and theming helpers in detail.
• How It Works - where the AI fits in the wider architecture.