Rapid Prototyping of Chatbots with Streamlit and Chainlit

Rapid prototyping is an iterative process for building and testing simple product versions to validate assumptions, which is particularly useful for AI applications. This guide compares two Python frameworks, Streamlit and Chainlit, for building chatbot prototypes. It provides a detailed walkthrough for setting up a local development environment using Ollama to run an open-source LLM like Google's Gemma 2B. The content then presents a step-by-step implementation of a basic chatbot using Streamlit, including the backend client logic and the user interface code. This serves as a practical demonstration before comparing it to a Chainlit implementation.