Why I Built Wanderer
2025-04-14 by Chris
When I started working on Wanderer, I wasn’t just building a tool - I was questioning the very foundation of how chatbots are typically created.
Just open your browser, and start building.
From my experience, most bot builders are overly complex, hard to maintain, and designed in a way that hides their inner workings. Too often, the journey from real-world problem to digital conversation feels like a compromise. Wanderer is my attempt to change that: to make chat logic visible, transparent, and radically accessible.
1. Programming Shouldn’t Be a Barrier
Designing chatbot conversations often means diving into conditionals, variables, and scripting even just to make a basic flow work. It becomes programming, not designing. That complexity alienates people who actually understand the content but not the code.
Wanderer flips that dynamic. It’s a visual system where logic lives in the graph itself. No hidden code. No technical hurdles. Just nodes, edges, and clear logic you can see and understand at a glance.
2. Visual Logic Over Guesswork
In traditional platforms, as conversations grow, they quickly become hard to follow. It’s difficult to see which input triggers what response, or why a particular branch was chosen.
Wanderer solves this with a graph-first approach. You don’t just build your bot you see it work. Every edge, condition, and state is visible and debuggable. The live traversal path is shown directly in the editor. It's not just WYSIWYG-it's WYSIWY-DO.
3. No More Black Boxes
Too many platforms feel like black boxes. You don't know how they work, where your data goes, or whether the company behind them will still exist next year. You’re locked into pricing plans, hidden limits, and external dependencies.
Wanderer is fully transparent and runs entirely in your browser. There’s no backend. No data collection. No vendor lock-in. Just a self-contained, visual programming environment that works out of the box right in the frontend.
4. Privacy and Client-Side Execution
Why do we send every user message across the internet just to receive a canned response? With modern browsers and edge computing, there's no technical reason for most bots to require a server at all.
Wanderer proves that powerful chat logic can live on the client. It's private by default. What you build stays in your browser unless you decide to share it.
5. Let Knowledge Flow Again
Much of today’s chatbot knowledge is trapped or buried in platforms, APIs, or proprietary formats. It’s difficult to extract, hard to repurpose, and nearly impossible to remix.
Wanderer uses open, text-based JSON for every flow. It’s readable, shareable, and forkable. That means knowledge can circulate freely again between people, teams, and tools. Bots become part of a commons, not walled gardens.
A New Philosophy of Chatbot Design
Wanderer is more than a tool - it’s an experiment in simplicity and openness. I want to see what happens when anyone, regardless of coding skill, can design meaningful conversations using only visual logic. When AI assistants can be transparent. When chatbots can be lightweight, forkable, and free.
If you've ever felt limited by the chatbot tools available today, I invite you to try Wanderer. No login. No tracking. No black box.
Title image: https://pixabay.com/de/photos/werkzeuge-konstruieren-boot-864983/