The bot that texts first — written by someone who can't code

What it does

This AstrBot plugin makes a bot send proactive messages in private and group chats after a conversation goes quiet for a while, using a randomized interval so it doesn’t feel like a cron job with feelings. Messages are context-aware (they reference earlier conversation history), respect per-session personas, and can carry a dynamic mood driven by an “unreplied counter” — ignore the bot and it gets visibly moodier, up to a configurable limit. There’s also a do-not-disturb window, TTS support, and message splitting that fakes realistic typing delays.

The interesting bit

The README’s developer note is the real story: the author states they wrote essentially zero lines of code — everything was AI-generated across hundreds of iterations and roughly 860 million tokens, with the human doing architecture design, prompt wrangling, and error feedback. It’s a candid case study in vibe-coded plugin development, warts and all.

Key highlights

• Triggers on user silence within a random time window, per session, with fully isolated state and counters
• Tasks persist across AstrBot restarts and plugin reloads, restored from file
• Dynamic emotions via an unreplied counter you can wire into prompts
• Do-not-disturb periods, TTS integration, and segmented replies with simulated typing gaps
• Ships with its own React/Material-UI WebUI for per-session configuration

Caveats

• The author openly warns the code and docs are AI-generated and should be reviewed carefully
• Proactive messages work by injecting a simulated user message, so output quality depends heavily on your prompts, persona, and model choice
• Requires a recent AstrBot (v4.24.0+); the README recommends always running the latest version

Verdict

Worth a look if you run AstrBot and want a companion bot that reaches out on its own — and doubly interesting as a documented example of a non-programmer shipping a 500-star plugin via AI. If you want hand-audited, human-written code, this isn’t it, and the author says so themselves.