Usually, when people think of AI, names like Gemini, ChatGPT, or—less often, which is a shame—Claude come to mind.

To use such a tool for anything other than a chat fiction in the manufacturer’s app or Microsoft’s Copilot, you need to buy access to an API. An API is an interface that allows us to use a language model for our own purposes.

In Europe, we also have excellent models. They might be smaller or less powerful, but they are completely sufficient for many tasks.

We have a fantastic Polish model, Bielik.ai, but to use it, we need to run it on our own computer or find a provider. Meanwhile, there’s a model we can use in simple applications for a very fair price—practically for free, as I haven’t yet managed to exceed the one million token limit in my simple agent, and that’s where the charges begin 🙂 It’s the French model, Mistral: https://mistral.ai/pricing#api-pricing

Now for a real-life example. I started a diet and I’m trying to control what I eat, its calorie count, and its protein content. This is important to me because I also go to the gym, and my plan is to turn fat into something more useful 😉

Instead of using an app where you have to click through everything you ate, I decided to use a model. I can simply write what I ate, and it estimates the calories and protein. Is it accurate? Of course not, but this isn’t an app for an oncology ward. A rough estimate is enough for me, with the awareness that it might sometimes be complete nonsense.

The idea was for the model to save this data in files, but also to occasionally create workout plans and put them in my calendar, specifying what I should do and when.

So, the technology choice was as follows: the LLM is Mistral. As the place where I’d input text and get a response, I chose Telegram. It has a great and simple function for creating bots (a ton of Google results on how to do it).

The whole setup is connected via n8n, hosted on a mikrus server: https://mikr.us/n8n.html

Ultimately, the model uploads the list of what I ate to Google Sheets.

The whole thing looks like this:

[View from the chat on the phone]

[The n8n workflow view]

[And the file with the food items]