Discord Bot Best Practices: What I Learned After 50,000 Users

My AI Discord bot started as a weekend project. Three months later, it serves 50,000 users across 200 servers. The journey taught me more about AI deployment than any tutorial could. Here's what actually matters at scale.

First, rate limiting is your friend, not your enemy. Early on, I let users spam queries, which burned through API credits and degraded experience for everyone. Now, users get 20 queries per hour with quality responses instead of unlimited mediocre ones. Nobody complained—people prefer working features over broken unlimited ones.

Second, context management is crucial. Discord conversations are chaotic—multiple threads, people jumping in, topic switches mid-conversation. I implemented conversation windowing: the bot only considers the last 10 messages in each channel, with explicit commands to reference earlier content. This kept costs manageable while maintaining coherence.