For context, I'm building an AI customer service agent for a real business as part of my final-year college thesis. The business (subject) is also my client, and I'm doing the project for free. It's a pre-post field study on how far AI can actually transform a traditional/conventional business, end, to end. So, while testing the agent before going live, I realized I'd been typing like a well-behaved user the whole time like in ChatGPT or other AI chat apps: one message, one complete question, then wait for the reply. In reality, almost nobody chats like that on WA. People send "hi", then the "quick question", then the real thing. So I tried it and watched my agent greet me, ask what my question was, and only then answer it. That's three replies for one question, out of order, with each run seeing only a fragment. It read like nobody was listening. The fix is debouncing. Append each incoming message to a buffer keyed by sender, write a unique token for the run, wait a few seconds, then read the token back. If it's still yours, you're the last message in, so grab the whole buffer and send it to the agent as one prompt. If a newer message overwrote your token, stop silently and let that run handle it. Last writer wins and the final execution carries every bubble. ONE THING WORTH KNOWING before you build it is that where you clear the buffer matters more than it looks. I first cleared it at the very end, after the send. If the agent call fails (rate limit, timeout, expired credential), the execution dies before cleanup and those messages stay in the buffer. 2 hours later the same person says "hi again" and gets an answer to what they asked this morning. Clear the buffer right after you read it instead. Worst case, a message gets lost and the customer just asks again. The other way, old messages sit there quietly until the bot answers something nobody asked days later and your client hears about it from their customer. Small details like this are what separate a demo/prototype from something a real business can actually rely on. And it's not just a WA thing, the same problem may shows up on Instagram DMs, Telegram, Messenger, or any chat channel where people type the way they talk.