How I ship AI chat features safely: Clerk-gated access, OpenAI ChatKit sessions, prompt/response guardrails, and performance-minded client loading in a Next.js 16 App Router codebase.
When you add AI chat to a public site, the #1 risk is turning it into an unbounded cost center. My approach: gate access with auth, keep sessions explicit, and load heavy client code only when the user actually opens the chat.
- Clerk for authentication (UI localized per user language)
- OpenAI ChatKit for the chat UI/session control
- Next.js 16 App Router for routing + server actions
- Guardrails: validation, rate limiting, and careful prompt construction
- Tooling: Cursor/Claude Code for faster iteration; evaluations before rollout
- Keep the page static: render content at build time.
- Lazy-load the chat bundle only when the sidebar is opened.
- Avoid mounting expensive animations/charts/maps above the fold.
- Treat AI as a feature module, not part of your base layout bundle.