I want to write a quick follow-up post about Algolia. Algolia is a powerful tool in my toolbox for vibe coding or rapidly iterating on ideas. Essentially, it’s a service where you give it a spreadsheet or information that you want to turn into a search engine, and it makes that data hyper-searchable.

Customer experience is undergoing a seismic shift, and Gladly is leading the charge with The Gladly Brief.

It’s a monthly breakdown of market insights, brand data, and investor-level analysis on how AI and CX are converging.

Learn why short-term cost plays are eroding lifetime value, and how Gladly’s approach is creating compounding returns for brands and investors alike.

Join the readership of founders, analysts, and operators tracking the next phase of CX innovation.

Subscribe here to stay informed and ahead of the curve.

Subscribe now

There are a couple of ways you can use it. You can interact with it via an API, which is highly code-heavy. But more importantly, you can vibe code with it, which means that with a couple of small pieces of information, you can tell an AI agent to go use an Algolia index or a search engine that you've already set up and embed it right into your application.

So that's what we're going to do. I'm just going to talk this through.

All right, so the first step is the grunt work. Just set up an Algolia account — it's free—and create an index; name it anything you want, like “my first search engine.” As soon as you do that, you can go to the settings and retrieve the application ID, which is an 8–12-character string.

You know the name of the index you just created, so you retrieve or copy the search API key. That search API key is just a key that lets people search so that you can embed it in a front-end application without any risk.