A Telegram bot that downloads TikTok videos — and the project where the ExdBots system design was born.
It looks simple — send a link, get a video. Under the hood it’s where I figured out how to structure a bot that could actually grow.
exd-tiktok-bot does one job well: you send it a TikTok link and it returns the video. But it was written before the agentic-engineering era, by hand, and it became my testing ground for system design — the menu system, the per-user state, the way flows are structured.
Those patterns worked well enough that I pulled them out into reusable libraries. The SDK idea and the internal packages that now power ExdBots all started here. It’s the template the platform grew from.
A small, deliberate pipeline: the menu/state core is the part that later generalized into the SDK.
This one was written the old way — no agents, no scaffolding, just figuring it out. That constraint is exactly why it matters to me: every structural decision was deliberate, because I had to make it myself.
The breakthrough was realizing the menu and state handling weren’t specific to TikTok at all — they were a general way to run any bot. Recognizing that, and extracting it cleanly, is what turned a single bot into the foundation for a platform.
