Project

DixonBaxi - AskUs

Description

DixonBaxi wanted to make 25 years of their studio (projects, philosophies, writing, internal thinking) accessible to anyone who wanted to engage with how the agency operates. Not a static archive or a polished case study site, but something you could have a conversation with. AskUs is the result: a public-facing conversational interface that lets students, peers, prospective clients and the broadly curious explore the studio's thinking on their own terms. Behind it sits a custom admin dashboard I built alongside the public app, giving the DixonBaxi team full ownership of what the system knows, how it speaks, and how it grows over time.

The public app is a retrieval-augmented conversational interface running on Google Gemini 3 Flash, with pgvector for semantic search across thousands of vectorised assets, Vertex AI for reranking, and Zod-validated structured responses across six distinct intents (project, visual, jobs, team, process, general). Few-shot learning mirrors DixonBaxi's voice, and configurable personas adjust register depending on what's being asked. The dashboard handles the other half of the system: a streamlined ingestion pipeline that parses PDFs, text and markdown, chunks documents via LangChain, generates Gemini embeddings, and stores them in Postgres for retrieval. Admins can manage clients, projects and assets, tune system prompts and personas, invite users, and reshape the agent's behaviour without touching code. Both apps are built on Next.js 16, React 19, Prisma and Supabase with strict TypeScript throughout.

The hardest part wasn't the engineering. It was deciding what AskUs shouldn't do: what it shouldn't claim, when it should defer, and how to keep the studio's actual material at the centre of every interaction rather than the model's interpretation of it. That principle runs through every decision: grounded retrieval over open generation, real source material over synthesised opinion, a UI that gets out of the way so the work can speak. Just as importantly, the dashboard means AskUs isn't a one-shot launch. DixonBaxi own the system that feeds it, and can keep adding, refining and reshaping what it knows for as long as the studio exists. AskUs is now live, free, and growing.