Build your own first line support and sales agent when a bought bot stalls

Matt Lawler was the only full time onboarding person at AssemblyAI, which gets over 1,000 API signups a day, and the bot they had bought solved only 10% of questions. In one week he used Claude Code to build Joey, an agent on the Claude Agent SDK that now greets everyone writing to sales, support or the site chat. Joey searches the docs as local markdown files, recalls past chats, executes and debugs code customers paste in, looks at screenshots, gives prices, escalating to Matt when unsure. A separate check screens replies for leaked internal details. In its first week live, end to end resolution went from 10% to 80%, at roughly $500 to $1,000 a month.