Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
Project: Founding Father A.I. — an 8-bit chat where you talk to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Abigail Adams, and a real language model answers in character for Theme 1: 8-Bit America.
It’s the actual “Summer Into AI“ swing: not a canned script — a live LLM (OpenAI gpt-4o-mini) behind a glowing pixel telegraph. Ask Franklin how to fly a kite in a storm and he’ll caution you with one of his own aphorisms.
How it works:
Pick a founder (each has a hand-drawn 8-bit pixel portrait). They greet you; starter questions get you going; or ask anything.
Your message goes to a serverless function, which adds the persona, calls the model, and returns a short, period-flavored reply.
8-bit parchment speech bubbles, CRT scanlines, stars-and-stripes — the whole 1776 telegraph aesthetic.
The part I’m proud of — doing AI safely on a static site: You can’t put an API key in a public web app — anyone could “view source” and steal it. So the key lives only as a server-side environment variable in a Vercel function; the browser never sees it and it’s never in the repo. The proxy also locks the founder persona server-side, caps tokens per reply, checks origin, and rate-limits — and the API account has a hard spend cap. Secure-by-design, and the code’s all public.
Theme connection (8-Bit America): the founders themselves, rendered as pixel portraits, speaking from 1776 through a retro machine — history meeting AI, which is the whole point of this competition.
A tip of the tricorn hat: go ask Eric founders what they make of a pixelated British Kraken — then bring your favorite quote back here.
▶️ Chat with them (live):
https://summer-into-ai-2026.vercel.app/
💾 Code (UI + the secure proxy function): https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/tree/main/week-1/founding-father
Three builds this week — a game, an instrument, and an AI. Small shipped work, three times. ★
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://merlinforge.substack.com/p/founding-father-ai-a-real-llm-in.